Seven

BULLETINS ALL DAY FROM IMMORTALITY

7 p.m. November 11, 1864: Thermometer 35.6 degrees, clouds 0, Winds NW 2, Therm Attached to Barometer 51.2. Barometer Observed Height 29.532 Dry Bulb 35.0 Wet Bulb 40,532.0 Humidity 70% Remarks: Cloudy and Chilly.

—Ebenezer Snell, The Meteorological Journal Kept at Amherst College

Evening was calm and clear, vivid moonlight.

—Cambridge (Mass.) Chronicle, Nov. 11, 1864

Thomas Wentworth Higginson answered immediately. He wanted to know more. He wanted to know everything. And he barraged Emily with questions.* How old are you? How long have you been writing? What writers do you read? What kind of education have you had? Who are your companions? Tell me about your family. Have you read Walt Whitman? In her return letter, Emily apologized for not responding sooner, although it had been only a matter of days. “You asked how old I was?” she wrote. “I made no verse – but one or two – until this winter – Sir.”¹ Her response was confusing and in a sense, true. Emily measured everything by a yardstick of poetry. But her answer also made clear that she did not want Mr. Higginson to know how long she had been working at her craft or that she had written hundreds of poems. Other answers were similarly coy, such as one about her companions. “Hills – Sir,” she wrote, “and the Sundown – and a Dog – large as myself, that my Father bought me – They are better than Beings – because they know – but do not tell.” She said her family consisted of a brother and sister, a mother who “does not care for thought,” and a father who bought her books but begged her not to read them. He “fears they joggle the Mind,” she added. She shrugged off her study at Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke by saying, “I went to school – but in your manner of the phrase – had no education.” Her literary influence, she reported, included the Revelations, Keats, Ruskin, Mr. and Mrs. Browning, and Sir Thomas Browne.† When it came to expressing her opinions of the Church, Emily was unequivocal. Her family was “religious – except me,” she said, “and address an Eclipse, every morning – whom they call their ‘Father.’” She dispatched his question about Walt Whitman with a wave of the hand. “I never read his Book – but was told that he was disgraceful.”‡

Emily told Higginson other things, too, and with rare candor. She wrote of tutors—her father’s young law clerks—who had taken her early literary ambition seriously. “My dying Tutor told me that he would like to live till I had been a poet,” she said. For years, she continued, “my Lexicon – was my only companion.”² She carefully chose details to paint herself as a solitary writer in search of a teacher. Multiple times she expressed frustration in being ill equipped to evaluate her own work. “While my thought is undressed,” she wrote, “I can make the distinction, but when I put them in the Gown – they look alike, and numb.”³ Something happened, she suggested, between the thinking stage and the moment she put pen to paper. “I could not weigh myself – Myself” was the way she put it.⁴ Yet as much as Emily emphasized an amateur status, she could not resist telling Higginson that professionals were interested in her work. Two editors had called on her at home. They “asked me for my Mind,” she said, adding they “would use it for the World.”⁵ As usual, Emily was silent about specifics that others might have shared. She could have been more forthcoming about the identity of the editors—Higginson would surely have known them—but she said no more. She also hid the fact that she had already published poems.§ The most striking absence concerned Sue. Her astute sister-in-law did not merit a single word, not even as a member of the family.

Shortly after their correspondence began, Emily Dickinson would be overcome by adversity. Her burgeoning literary relationship with Thomas Wentworth Higginson would be threatened as her physical health faltered. “The Physician has taken away my Pen,” she would tell him.⁶ Emily had begun to notice serious problems with her eyesight a year before contacting Higginson, although the disease may have begun its insidious advance much earlier.^¶ For the woman who keenly observed the world around her, the thought of losing her vision was terrifying. Emily’s crisis reached a peak on a cold November night in 1864—not in at her home in Amherst—but in a boardinghouse in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She knew she was at a turning point. She wanted to write more poems, but she didn’t know if her eyesight would allow it. The letters she had already exchanged with Higginson made her realize that a larger world beyond Amherst and Springfield was interested in her work. In the perilous situation she was in, Emily recognized she was not who she once had been. But she also knew she wanted to be more.

In the time before her health problems escalated, Emily and Higginson inched toward each other—he posing questions and she responding or dodging them—and they settled into comfortable roles as teacher and student. Her eagerness to be instructed must have been irresistible to Higginson. “I would like to learn,” she told him. “Could you tell me how to grow – or is it unconveyed – like Melody – or Witchcraft?”⁷ He had done his best in offering advice, noting that when a shift in word choice could have provided a rhyme, she rejected it. She opted instead for surprise and defiance of form. Miss Dickinson didn’t appear to be careless or motivated by whim, he thought.⁸ Rather she seemed to be reaching for something more evocative—an arresting bump in rhythm, a rhyme more minor-key than major, or an image as startling as those in her alabaster poem: “Dots, On a Disc of Snow.” Her refusal to conform, he would learn, had less to do with satisfying the reader’s expectations than upending them.

Emily wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson nearly every month when they first began corresponding. She relished his queries, later telling him, “You ask great questions accidentally.”⁹ Members of her own family had given up questioning Emily—about her reclusiveness, her resistance to travel, or mysterious callers such as Reverend Wadsworth. Since Emily and Higginson had never met, their relationship was built on letters only, words she could manipulate or hide behind. Letters were “the Mind alone, without corporeal friend,” she had said.¹⁰ Do you have a photograph, Higginson once had asked.# No, she replied—but I “am small, like the Wren, and my Hair is bold, like the Chestnut Bur – and my eyes, like the Sherry in the Glass, that the Guest leaves.”¹¹ When he had suggested she wait to publish, she scoffed. “I smile when you suggest that I delay ‘to publish’ – that being foreign to my thought, as Firmament to Fin – If fame belonged to me, I could not escape her . . . My Barefoot-Rank is better.”¹² He asked about her seclusion and received a playful, cagey reply. “Of ‘shunning Men and Women’ – they talk of Hallowed things, aloud – and embarrass my Dog.”¹³ There was also conversation about the work itself. Higginson had asked about her poem’s perplexing pronouns and she told him she was not writing autobiography. “When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse,” she declared, “it does not mean – me – but a supposed person.”¹⁴ It was one of the most emphatic comments of her life.

Perhaps most revealing was her description of how it felt to write a poem. Nature, she said, was an inspiration. The impulse to create occurred to her on walks when the sight of a tree or an angle of light would suddenly seize her. At that moment she simply had to transform what she saw into words, she said, and the urge affected her physically. “A sudden light on Orchards, or a new fashion in the wind troubled my attention,” she explained, “a palsy, here – the Verses just relieve.” At those moments something took hold of her—violently. “My little Force explodes,” she told Higginson, “and leaves me bare and charred.”¹⁵ Yet as forthcoming as she could be, Emily continued to be elusive. Higginson quickly realized he was not dealing with an amateur poet—the kind who taxed his generosity and peeved his wife. He worried Emily might be too brilliant for him, beyond his ability to help. When he told her so, she tossed aside the concern. She was used to men not understanding her. They always asked her to repeat what she said or explain herself in plain language. “All men say ‘What’ to me,” she admitted, with a touch of weariness.¹⁶ But Thomas Wentworth Higginson seemed different to her; he was willing, steady, open, someone who would not interrupt or ask what in the world she was talking about. When his letters to her stopped suddenly, she was alarmed. Perhaps she had told him too much.

“Did I displease you, Mr Higginson,” she urgently wrote him in October 1862.¹⁷ She had not. As much as Emily had shared with her correspondent, she knew little about him. Months after their correspondence began, Higginson had joined the Union Army. He was thirty-eight. Dickinson had no idea Captain Higginson had been drilling troops at Camp John Wool in Worcester fifty miles away from Amherst. Higginson’s entire life had been a battle between two poles: a life of the mind and one committed to action. The decision to put aside his literary career for a political cause was a familiar one. Three years earlier, he’d been one of the Secret Six who’d financially supported John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry, and, before that, he’d brought axes to Boston’s Faneuil Hall to help abolitionists free a captured slave. The summer of 1862, when President Lincoln had called for 300,000 more troops, Higginson found he could not live with himself. It was unprincipled, he believed, to spend his days writing nature essays for the Atlantic when other men risked their lives.** “I never could hold up my head again, in Worcester or even elsewhere, if I did not vindicate my past words by actions though tardy,” he said.¹⁸ Within weeks Union officers put him in charge of preparing young and untested Worcester boys. Later that fall he was promoted and reassigned; Captain Higginson would become a colonel and assume leadership of the first Negro regiment of Union soldiers.†† Emily read about it in the Republican. “I should have liked to see you, before you became improbable,” she wrote, her letter somehow catching up with him in camp off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina.¹⁹ She had hoped to meet him in person, but a visit would have to wait. “Best Gains – must have the Losses’ Test,” she said. She had no idea how prophetic she was.²⁰

At first things went well for Colonel Higginson. He was impressed with his troops, did well in recruiting others from nearby rice plantations, and understood he had to earn the respect of Negro soldiers who had reason to doubt the goodwill of any white man. He gained his soldiers’ trust by listening to stories about their families and lobbying for pay parity with white Union troops.^‡‡ Yet as much as he found purpose in training soldiers, Higginson yearned for real battles instead of meaningless skirmishes. He soon received his wish. While commanding 250 troops in a transport boat headed up the South Edisto River, Higginson’s boat snagged and became a target. Confederates fired from bluffs and he was hit on the side. He didn’t know with what. A bullet? A piece of wood? A spent shell? Higginson survived and was hospitalized, but did not improve. “I am in rather a state of collapse,” he finally confessed to his mother.²¹ His old friend Louisa May Alcott volunteered to come south and help him regain strength.§§

When the letters from Higginson stopped as he convalesced, Emily sent another frantic note.²² She had reason to feel on edge. Problems with her eyesight had been worsening and she was anxious. There were good days and bad, she said, and that intermittency only exacerbated the misery. She never knew when pain and blurriness would hit, and she didn’t know if the problem had gone away for good or would come back with greater intensity. Lately the trouble had become so serious her family thought she needed medical help from a specialist in Boston. Her symptoms were many: sensitivity to light, headache, pain around the eyes, eyestrain, tearing, diminished clarity, fatigue from any task that demanded concentration from her eyes—certainly writing. Sometimes her eyes felt gritty, as if she were standing in a dusty field on a windy day. Daytime itself had become an enemy. Bright lights, reflections off snow, even a glint of light off white paper caused problems. The sun was even worse. It felt dangerous, and triggered every affliction—ache, fuzziness, and disorientation. Staying indoors on bright days and not being able to garden must have felt like incarceration to her. While Emily may not have articulated it, the psychological effects of her diminished sight had to take a toll too. Household tasks were more difficult to accomplish, making her less independent and reliant on others to help. With reduced vision, she had to be more vigilant, keenly aware of what she couldn’t do or couldn’t see. She may have seen things that weren’t there because her eyes could not be depended on for precision. She sought the dark during daylight and inhabited the night—upside down with the natural order of the day. Her life had become liminal, experienced in a twilight where sensory experience could not be fully felt. In place of sharp perception—what she had depended on and used to such a rich extent in her poetry—was now dimness, ambiguity, and haze.²³

Emily knew something was profoundly wrong, and she would probably need to leave Amherst for diagnosis and treatment. When his children were young, Edward Dickinson always worried about their eyes. He told Austin to ease up on studying, as if he had a premonition that reading would lead to blindness. When Edward caught Emily stealing a few snatches of Melville one morning after her eye problems had become worse, he scolded her.²⁴ She also seemed to have given up reading newspapers. She did not know Higginson had been wounded, even though the Republican had reported it. Neither did she know Major Hunt had been killed—her friend Helen’s husband—the man whose humor about Carlo and gravity had delighted her.¶¶ Writing to her Norcross cousins, Emily admitted she felt desolate. “Nothing has happened but loneliness, perhaps too daily to relate,” she wrote.²⁵ Carlo stood by her, as faithful a dog as he always had been, but she was discouraged and frightened.²⁶ On top of everything else, the house was cold, she was forced to wear a bonnet indoors, and when she reported on the weather she wrote, “No frost at our house yet. Thermometer frost, I mean.”²⁷ In February 1864—with Vinnie by her side—thirty-three-year-old Emily met with a physician in Boston. Dr. Henry Williams, New England’s preeminent ophthalmologist, might know what to do. He was known as an excellent surgeon and prolific scholar. Williams suggested a treatment, and—as Emily feared—she would have to move near him for care.## Cousins Fanny and Loo offered a solution for lodging. Emily could move into the Cambridge boardinghouse where they resided and travel across the river to Boston for treatments with Dr. Williams. She had only two months to prepare for the long stay and an uncertain future. She would be busy.

It was one thing for Emily to gather up her belongings and say goodbye to her dog and the rest of her family. It was quite another to step away from her desk and her poetry. Something remarkable happened that spring of 1864 as she made plans to move to Cambridge. She published more poetry—all anonymously—than at any other time in her life. Anonymity had always suited her; it protected her privacy and seclusion. Within months, five poems appeared in six different publications, and in newspapers and magazines from Brooklyn to Boston. Her sunset verse, “Blazing in gold, and quenching in purple,” appeared first on February 29 in the Drum Beat, a daily newspaper released during the two-week Brooklyn Fair. Proceeds from the fair supported the US Sanitary Commission aiding injured Union soldiers. Dickinson admitted she could not refuse to “help the sick and wounded soldiers,” yet it was unclear—as it always was—just how involved she was in submitting the verse.***²⁸ After the poem appeared in the Drum Beat, it was also published in the Springfield Daily Republican and once more in the weekend edition. Three days later a second verse was published in the Drum Beat, “Flowers – well, if anybody.” The poem made the rounds in the Republican too. It also appeared in the Boston Post. No doubt a Boston editor who liked the work had simply clipped it out of the Drum Beat or the Republican and republished it in his paper without comment or authorization. Who knows how many editors in Chicago, Philadelphia, or Cincinnati did the same? Nine days after the flower poem, a third verse appeared, her elegy “These are the days when birds come back.” The next day a fourth was published, “Some keep the Sabbath going to church,” and circulated in the Round Table, a national literary magazine from New York. At the end of April, a fifth poem, “Success is counted sweetest” was published in the Brooklyn Daily Union. Readership for the five poems in six publications was impressive. The Drum Beat published 6,000 copies of the newspaper every day. The ambitious Round Table rivaled the Atlantic, and boasted of readers from Chicago, Boston, and London. The Boston Post’s circulation was 9,500 daily, and the readership for Samuel Bowles’s Daily Republican stood at 15,000, the weekly at 14,000, and was for sale on newsstands all over New England. Although they did not realize it, thousands of people were reading Emily Dickinson in the spring of 1864, and a circle of New York literary men were doing their best to promote her.†††²⁹ But Emily sought no further exchanges with the editors and did not take advantage of their publishing connections to further her work.³⁰ The explosion of publications ended when she dropped her bags in Fanny and Loo’s rooms in late April 1864.^‡‡‡ Certainly Emily wanted to aid the Union cause, but the flurry of published poems suggests she may have had another concern. Worried about her eyes and the possible end of her creative production, Emily may have wanted to make her mark while she still could.³¹

As improbable as it sounded, Colonel Higginson could have seen some of Emily’s New York publications while he was in camp, recovering from his wounds. Earlier she had sent him “Success is counted sweetest” and “Some keep the Sabbath going to Church”; he would have recognized the poems even though they had been published anonymously.³² He might also have been aware of Dickinson’s burst of publication through soldiers’ unsanctioned gift exchanges across enemy lines. When Confederate and Union forces were not engaged in combat, pickets often rigged up small boats and floated gifts, including newspapers, to their counterparts across the river.§§§ Massachusetts troops across the Rappahannock River in Virginia sailed copies of the Springfield Republican and received issues of the Richmond Daily Dispatch in return. During the spring of 1864, it was possible that Emily’s two poems in the Republican may have sailed aboard clandestine crafts and ended up in Higginson’s hands.³³

After his wounding, Thomas Wentworth’s Higginson’s health improved, but not by much. Doctors finally diagnosed his weakness as malaria and he rested in camp presiding over courts-martial, and walking once or twice a day to the river. Many days Higginson sat with Charlotte Forten and edited her manuscript on life in the Sea Islands. Editor James T. Fields at the Atlantic Monthly might enjoy it, he thought.^¶¶¶ Higginson seemed constitutionally unable to turn aside a serious woman who asked for literary help. It was not merely courtesy that propelled him. He believed in women’s rights, and his impulse was political as much as literary. Colonel Higginson suspected he would not stay in the military any longer. He loved his men and the soldier’s life, but with his health impaired, he no longer felt useful. “I can understand a gradual sliding into slippers & dressing gown,” he admitted, perhaps with a touch of guilt—the old tug between a life of the mind and a life of action continuing to trouble him.³⁴ He thought of returning to Cambridge, Massachusetts, his hometown. He had no idea Emily Dickinson had moved there herself. By the spring of 1864, Higginson resigned his post. His wife, Mary, had grown tired of Worcester and proposed moving to a boardinghouse in Newport, Rhode Island: the rent was affordable and the city was filled with artists and writers. Higginson wrapped up his military business and set sail for New England. He did not know what awaited him. “I have no restless ambition, never have had,” he wrote Mary.³⁵ In June the Springfield Republican reported, “Col. T. W. Higginson is now at Newport, R.I., in poor health.”³⁶

Emily was in Cambridge when she heard the news. “Are you in danger – I did not know that you were hurt,” she wrote. “Will you tell me more?”³⁷ Months as an invalid had made Emily more considerate of Higginson. “A nearness to Tremendousness – / An Agony procures,” she had written in a poem.³⁸ Her previous letters always had focused on her needs, but this time she asked about him. “I wish to see you more than before I failed,” she said.³⁹ The news of Higginson’s health left Emily distressed, and she worried his letters might not find her at the boardinghouse. Her handwriting was larger and more disjoint, and she didn’t trust her eyes to legibly write her new address.### She scissored the details from another letter: “Miss Dickinson 86, Austin Street, Cambridge, Mass.”⁴⁰ She described her new surroundings unfavorably. “I work in my Prison,” she told him. “Carlo did not come, because he would die, in Jail, and the Mountains, I could not hold now, so I brought but the Gods.”⁴¹ Was Higginson to understand “the Gods” were her verses? With Emily’s figurative turns, he could not be sure. She reported the barest of details about her health, telling him only that she had moved in April and did not expect to leave anytime soon. Her doctor, she said, “does not let me go.” Emily acknowledged she was at a low point in her life and that word of Higginson’s recovery “would excel my own.” Yet she did not tell him what was exactly wrong with her. “Can you render my Pencil?” was all she said.⁴²

Emily’s eye problem, it appeared, was iritis. Her primary symptoms—dim vision, pain, and red eyes that ached in light—were consistent with that diagnosis. There would be treatments in Dr. Williams’s Boston office and instructions for protecting her eyes during the day: proscriptions that included rest and limiting her exposure to light.**** She could need bandages to block the sun.⁴³ Williams used several protocols, medication, eye drops, and a new instrument for the treatments.⁴⁴ An ophthalmoscope illuminated the interior of her eye and enabled him to examine muscles controlling her pupil, blood vessels, and the surrounding nerves. If pressure within her eyes did not improve, he might puncture her eyes’ anterior chambers. Mercury could be administered. Cocaine, too, for pain. If all treatments failed, a portion of the iris might be removed, although that was considered a step no one wanted to take. To make her more comfortable, a darkened room and dry flannel wrapped around a jug of hot water would help. She could hold the jug against her face. Doctors reported they could detect changes iritis brought to a patient’s eyes. The iris lost its brilliance, they said. A once shining, clear appearance became muddy-looking. In severe cases, the iris could take on another shape, sometimes looking like the ace of clubs. Physicians also knew that the emotional effects of the disease were just as pronounced. One medical text stated, “Cases of iritis, especially those occurring in men accustomed to an active independent life, often produce a very irritable condition of mind, followed by great depression, the result of the pain, partial blindness, and resultant dependence on others.”⁴⁵ No one knew how Emily had contracted the disease. Medical professionals later theorized iritis stemmed from a bacterial infection such as consumption. Cousin Sophia Holland and Aunt Lavinia both had succumbed to consumption. Emily herself had a bad cough for weeks as a young girl. It was possible her early respiratory problems later triggered iritis. If his treatment did not work, Dr. Williams knew inflammation within Emily’s eye could form clots and lead to permanent blindness. Even if his procedures were successful, the condition might reoccur. He wrote to Edward Dickinson, saying—while satisfied with progress—recovery would be gradual. Emily was not so sure. “I suppose I had been discouraged so long,” she said.”⁴⁶

Not being able to read was the worst complication of her illness. Dr. Williams had forbidden it, or at least told Emily to drastically limit her time with books. She later said not being able to read was the only restriction in her life “that ever made me tremble.” It felt to her like “shutting out . . . the strongest friends of the soul.” Emily never looked upon books as her “tormentors,” but that’s exactly what they had become. Dr. Williams “might as well have said, ‘Eyes be blind,’ ‘heart be still,’” she lamented. She mostly conformed to her doctor’s dictates. She did read letters from Vinnie and Sue and kept up with news as she could: she noted Nathaniel Hawthorne had died. But what she had first called her prison, she said, now felt to her like “Siberia.”⁴⁷ Then there was her writing, of course. Dr. Williams “is not willing I should write,” she wrote Vinnie.⁴⁸ Perhaps Emily saw abandoning books as the more severe blow, because she continued to write. She wrote letters from Cambridge, telling first Vinnie then Sue that she missed them the most.⁴⁹ She corresponded with Higginson. She wrote her nephew Ned on his third birthday, trying to amuse him with a description of a bumblebee: “Emily knows a Man who drives a Coach like a Thimble, and turns the Wheel all day with his Heel.”⁵⁰ And she wrote poems, perhaps as many as one hundred during the time of her distress.†††† She realized using her eyes to write might subvert Dr. Williams’s treatment plan and perhaps prolong or further endanger her eyes, but she was willing to take the risk. Writing must have felt to her like stolen time, a precious transgression that might exact a devastating price.

From Blank to Blank –

A Threadless Way

I pushed Mechanic feet –

To stop – or perish – or advance –

Alike indifferent –

If end I gained

It ends beyond

Indefinite disclosed –

I shut my eyes – and groped as well

’Twas lighter – to be Blind – ⁵¹

While Emily’s verse always drew from more than the literal details of her life, impaired vision made her rely on her imagination even more. If she could not see distinctly or at all, she would have to tap into her metaphorical reserve. She may have found that imagination gave her a richer sense of perception than what she could discern with her eyes.⁵² She also may have discovered that her other senses—touch, taste, smell, sound—had grown keener or were able to instruct her in ways she had not fully explored.‡‡‡‡ Emily’s eyesight reduced what she saw, but not what she could understand. Years later an appreciation for a more penetrating power than her eyes could produce may have been on her mind. She told Sue, “Cherish Power – dear – Remember that stands in the Bible between the Kingdom and the Glory, because it is wilder than either of them.”⁵³ She could still imagine, and she might still stitch more poems into fascicles.

Dont put up my Thread & Needle –

I’ll begin to Sow

When the Birds begin to whistle –

Better stitches – so –

These were bent – my sight got crooked –

When my mind – is plain

I’ll do seams – a Queen’s endeavor

Would not blush to own –

Hems – too fine for Lady’s tracing

To the sightless knot –

Tucks – of dainty interspersion –

Like a dotted Dot –

Leave my Needle in the furrow –

Where I put it down –

I can make the zigzag stitches –

Straight – when I am strong –

Till then – dreaming I am sowing

Fetch the seam I missed –

Closer – so I – at my sleeping –

Still surmise I stitch – ⁵⁴

Although Emily initially felt her lodgings had been a “prison,” she tempered her view as time went on. She later confessed that she had found friends in the “Wilderness.”⁵⁵ Her rooms were in Mrs. Bangs’s Boarding House, a mile from Harvard College, and a block from Cambridge’s main thoroughfare with its bustling shops, livery terminal, and banks.§§§§ The greatest adjustment in her new residence was lack of privacy. Most lodgers had a private chamber and sitting area but encountered one another over meals. Emily’s adaptation to so public an environment must have been a wonder to Austin, Sue, and Vinnie. Yet, within a month of arriving, she yearned to come home. She was impatient with her progress, reported “calls at the Doctor’s are painful,” and that she wasn’t allowed to walk alone.⁵⁶ Cambridge simply was not Amherst, Emily said, even though Fanny and Loo took good care of her.⁵⁷ She missed the sound of the whippoorwill in the family orchard, wondered if apples were ripe, whether the wild geese had already crossed, and how Austin’s tobacco crop had fared.⁵⁸ She was worried about her mother’s cough and yet another of Vinnie’s cats that had gone missing.⁵⁹ She wrote lonely letters to Sue, saying she felt at the “Centre of the Sea” as if she were submerged, and later told her “I live in the Sea always and know the Road.”⁶⁰ She admitted that she “flew” most of the time, hiding from others as much as she could.⁶¹ But she couldn’t avoid eating and had to gather with the other boarders for dinner and polite conversation. Everyone around the dining table seemed in transition—on the verge of something better or something worse. Emily could not determine which prospect awaited her. All seemed to her a “Foreigner,” she told Vinnie.⁶²

By November 1864 Emily Dickinson prepared to return home. She was relieved to be leaving Cambridge, but felt hopeless about her eyes. Her problems were “sometimes easy, sometimes sad,” she said.⁶³ Emily asked Vinnie to meet her train alone, and cautioned her sister. “Emily may not be able as she was,” she told her, “but all she can, she will.” She had taken on an odd habit of using the third person in talking about herself, as if the healthy Emily were as distant to her as a stranger. But she wanted to be clear with Vinnie so her sister would not be shocked by her altered appearance. “I have been sick so long I do not know the Sun,” she wrote, “now the World is dead.”⁶⁴

Thomas Wentworth Higginson was feeling spiritless himself. “This turning of the leaf is a trying epoch,” he wrote.⁶⁵ What he considered the most important chapter in his life—his days in the military—was over. All that remained to him were words, and he had begun to doubt if they mattered as much as he once thought. He hoped he might be able to transform his war experience into essays. “Grind it into paint,” he had said, but the work did not come easy: his mind was clouded, his wife was suffering from rheumatism, and his beloved mother was near death.⁶⁶ He was grateful for distractions. A clever new boarder had moved into Mrs. Dame’s Newport boardinghouse. She was a young widow with an eight-year-old son—a Mrs. Helen Hunt, originally from Amherst. He continued writing Emily and hoped to meet her someday. While he knew better than to assign autobiographical details to her poems—there was always that “supposed person” speaking in her verse—one poem appeared to address the medical crisis she now endured.⁶⁷ She had sent the poem to him earlier. The verse struck the tension between what she could imagine and what her eyes could no longer see. She suggested that seeing with her eyes—taking in as much as she could and owning the visible world—was lethal. Perhaps, the poem implied, she wanted to see too much.

Before I got my eye put out

I liked as well to see –

As other Creatures, that have Eyes

And know no other way –

But were it told to me – today –

That I might have the sky

For mine – I tell you that my Heart

Would split, for size of me –

The meadows – mine –

The Mountains – mine –

All Forests – Stintless Stars –

As much of Noon as I could take

Between my finite eyes –

The Motions of The Dipping Birds –

The Morning’s Amber Road –

For mine – to look at when I liked –

The News – would strike me dead –

So safer Guess –

With just my soul opon the Window pane –

Where other Creatures put their eyes –

Incautious – of the Sun – ⁶⁸

That November of 1864, voters went to the polls to cast their ballots for President Abraham Lincoln or Gen. George McClellan. Near Emily’s boardinghouse, crowds gathered at City Hall, where men carried a wounded Union captain up the steps. The officer tipped his cap and told the gathering he was casting the first vote of his life. Onlookers roared and offered three cheers.⁶⁹ The next day, when news of Lincoln’s victory reached Cambridge, supporters paraded through the streets, shouting and cheering. Two days later—on Friday, November 11—marchers were at it again. The evening was so bright with moonlight it almost seemed like noon. As she listened to the parade, Emily thought about what was ahead of her. She knew her health was far from certain. Her eyes might recover or they might become worse. Permanent blindness was not out of the question. But what she could not see, she could hear. “The Drums keep on for the still Man,” she wrote Vinnie. The beats for Lincoln were like a meter, counting out her prospects.⁷⁰ When the noisy parade reached Harvard College a mile down the road, marchers wondered if Robert Todd Lincoln would come out to greet them. The president’s son was a law student at the college, although he had chafed under his studies and wanted to join Ulysses S. Grant in action. In the White House, Abraham Lincoln read a telegram from General Grant extending congratulations on his reelection. The greeting offered the president respite from lists of the dead—those awful bulletins as they were known—that crowded his mind. Lincoln realized there was much to do—unfinished work—he had called it in his address at the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg.¶¶¶¶ For Emily, the coming days felt like an uncertain pause between the life she once knew and life she could not yet see. “The only News I know,” she wrote Higginson, “Is Bulletins all day / From Immortality.”⁷¹

An old friend would never forget the look of Emily’s wounded eyes. Once bright hazel, they had become “melted & fused,” he said, like “two dreamy, wondering wells of expression.”⁷² In two weeks, Emily would return home to Amherst, where her mother would cook the fricassee beans she liked so much, her father would read her news of Sherman’s March to the Sea, and Vinnie would treat her older sister like a delicate teacup, fragile and liable to crack. Once again she would be surrounded by all her poems with their images of bandages, stitches, and finite eyes.#### ⁷³ “War feels to me an oblique place,” Emily said.⁷⁴ Few could tell if she were talking about General Sherman or the growing darkness around her.

* Unfortunately, Higginson’s letters to Dickinson have not survived. Some of his questions to Dickinson can be construed by her responses. Dickinson frequently reiterates Higginson’s question or places his query in quotation marks. The letters upon which this chapter is based had previously been misdated. This letter most likely was written on November 11, 1864, when the Lincoln Clubs of Cambridge held a torchlight procession. Contemporaneous newspaper accounts attest to the re-dating. On November 13, the date Johnson and Leyda assign to the letter, a powerful storm swept through New England. Parades could not have taken place in such bad weather. [Beverly Gill, email to the author, April 28, 2017, Boston Public Library Archives; George E. Clark, email to the author, April 28, 2017, Houghton Library, Harvard University.]

† Dickinson loved the Brownings and mentioned them often in her letters. She wrote of Keats only twice in her life, and after her letter to Higginson, she never mentioned Ruskin again. She might have been currying favor with Higginson when it came to Ruskin and Sir Thomas Browne, writers he cited in his essay “Letter to a Young Contributor.” [Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Theodora Ward, associate ed., The Letters of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1958), 405.]

‡ Higginson may have been thinking about Whitman, whom he had bumped into in Boston. Whitman, perched on a counter at his publisher’s office, was reading proofs of the third edition of Leaves of Grass. He did not impress Higginson. The “personal impression made on me by the poet was not so much of manliness as of Boweriness,” he wrote. Higginson admitted he may have been prejudiced against Whitman’s poetry because he had read it while seasick—“a fact which doubtless increased for me the intrinsic unsavoriness of certain passages.” [Brenda Wineapple, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 113.]

§ One editor had to be Bowles or Holland representing the Springfield Republican. Karen Dandurand suggests the second editor was Richard Salters Storrs. An Amherst College graduate, Storrs was a friend of Samuel Bowles and frequent commencement guest of Sue and Austin. [Karen Dandurand, “New Dickinson Civil War Publications,” American Literature 56, no. 1, March 1984, 17–27.]

¶ Dickinson scholar James R. Guthrie believes the poet’s eye problems may have begun as early as 1851. He cites a Boston visit Dickinson made that year to consult Dr. William Wesselhoft. [James R. Guthrie, Emily Dickinson’s Vision: Illness and Identity in Her Poetry (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), 178.]

# Emily did have a photograph, a daguerreotype taken around the time she was a student at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. Perhaps she did not offer it because she was so much younger in the image. She was thirty-one in 1862 when writing her initial letters to Higginson.

** When Lincoln initiated the military draft in 1864, thirty-five-year-old Austin Dickinson, like other men of financial means, bought a substitute to serve in his place. Paying a substitute between $300 and $500 was legal and not entirely uncommon. The amount of money was based on an unskilled laborer’s yearly income. Many men looked upon paying a substitute as shirking one’s duty and labeled the Civil War a “rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.” [Wayne E. Phaneuf and Joseph Carvalho III, A Not So Civil War: Western Massachusetts at Home and in Battle, vol. 1 (Springfield, MA: The Republican, 2015), 131; Jay Leyda, The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson, vol. 2 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), 88 and 89.]

†† It is often believed Robert Gould Shaw commanded the first regiment of freed slaves in the Civil War. Shaw commanded the Massachusetts 54th, but he was not the first to lead a black regiment. Shaw’s regiment mustered in 1863 and Higginson’s in 1862.

‡‡ Higginson wrote many letters to newspapers, criticizing the federal government on pay inequity for black soldiers. His letters appeared in the New York Evening Post, New-York Daily Tribune, and the New York Times. Black soldiers received $10 a month with a deduction of $3 for clothing. [Christopher Looby, ed., The Complete Civil War Journals and Selected Letters of Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 55, 61; Wayne E. Phaneuf and Joseph Carvalho III, A Not So Civil War: Western Massachusetts at Home and in Battle, vol. 1 (Springfield, MA: The Republican, 2015), 130.]

§§ Alcott seemed to want to get away from Concord as much as anything. “Don’t you want a cook, [or] nurse,” she wrote Higginson. “I am willing to enlist in any capacity . . . to be busied in some more loyal labor than sitting quietly at home spinning fictions when such fine facts are waiting for all of us to profit by & celebrate.” She did not make the journey to South Carolina. [Looby, 318]

¶¶ Major Hunt died in the Brooklyn Naval Yard while testing a new submarine battery. A shell exploded and gas overwhelmed him. He fell into the submarine’s hold and died of a fatal brain concussion. Edward Bissell Hunt was forty-one. [Leyda, vol. 2, 82–83.]

## Patients such as Emily who could afford good medical care were not usually treated in a hospital. Instead they moved into hotels or boardinghouses near a physician in order to be treated. [Martin Wand and Richard B. Sewall, “‘Eyes Be Blind Heart Be Still’: A New Perspective on Emily Dickinson’s Eye Problem,” New England Quarterly 52, no. 3, September 1979, 400–406.]

*** Other Drum Beat issues included the works of Louisa May Alcott, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and William Cullen Bryant. Dickinson’s verse was published anonymously, as was all her work that spring. Even though Drum Beat contributors received complimentary copies of the newspaper, Alcott and others would not have known the author of the sunset poem. But Richard Salters Storrs may have. Storrs was Austin and Susan’s old friend and an Amherst College trustee. He edited the Drum Beat and would have encountered Emily’s verse through Samuel Bowles.

††† One of the editors of the Round Table was Henry Sweetser, Emily’s first cousin. His coeditor—his cousin Charles—was a Dickinson neighbor who worked for a time at the Republican. Even the Brooklyn Daily Union had an Amherst connection. Gordon Ford, husband of Emily’s girlhood friend Emily Fowler Ford, was one of the newspaper’s founders.

‡‡‡ Emily moved to an area of Cambridge one mile east of Harvard College referred to as Cambridgeport. The two names were used interchangeably. The boardinghouse stood near what is now Central Square on Bishop Richard Allen Drive. [Hiroko Uno, Emily Dickinson Visits Boston (Kyoto, Japan: Yamaguchi Publishing House, 1990) 58.]

§§§ On April 28, 1863, the US War Department issued a call for wounded men to serve in the Invalid Corps, later called the Veteran Reserve Corps. The call sought former Union troops who had lost arms or legs or were otherwise injured to reenlist for light duty, including work as pickets.

¶¶¶ Charlotte Forten [Grimke]’s essay “Life on the Sea Island” appeared in the May 1864 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, and detailed her work as an African American teacher in what became known as the Port Royal Experiment.

### Dickinson’s handwriting from this era is strikingly different compared to earlier years. Thomas H. Johnson, editor of the first complete edition of Dickinson’s poems, observed that the poet’s handwriting showed significant “change in appearance: letters elongated and uneven. . . . Strongly slanted. Tendency toward separation of letters, a few words of four of five letters being entirely unligated. Some capitals, such as A and C exaggerated in size.” [Thomas H. Johnson, ed. The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1955), liv.] In this early June 1864 letter to Higginson, Dickinson’s handwriting is noticeably larger—some lines include two or three words at most. See https://www.digitalcommonwealth.org/search/commonwealth:kh04mv993/.

**** There is no definitive diagnosis for Emily Dickinson’s eye problems. Theories have included exotropia (or strabismus), lupus erythematous, iritis/uveitis, and a kind of psychosomatic blindness. I favor the iritis diagnosis, with the possibility of exotropia as well. Iritis is an inflammation of the muscles of the eye. With exotropia, the eyes turn outward. Interviews I conducted with descendants of Dickinson’s Norcross relatives indicated exotropia ran in the family and has been present for generations. My descriptions of Dickinson’s likely treatment for iritis derive from comments in the poet’s letters, Dr. Williams’s written protocols for addressing the disease, and medical texts from the nineteenth century. [Polly Longsworth and Norbert Hirschhorn, “‘Medicine Posthumous’: A New Look at Emily Dickinson’s Medical Conditions,” New England Quarterly 69, no. 2, June 1996, 299–316; Martha Ackmann, “ ‘I’m Glad I Finally Surfaced’: A Norcross Descendent Remembers Emily Dickinson, Emily Dickinson Journal 5, no. 2, Fall 1996, 120–26.]

†††† Alfred Habegger contends Dickinson continued to write while being treated for eye disease in 1864. He believes she brought her penciled rough drafts home to Amherst and in 1865 copied many over in ink. [Alfred Habegger, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson (New York: Random House, 2001), 489.]

‡‡‡‡ Recent medical studies have confirmed that the loss of sight does enhance other senses as well as bolster memory and language use. A 2017 study by researchers at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary discovered that the “brain ‘rewires’ itself to enhance other senses in blind people . . . [that enhancement] is possible through the process of neuroplasticity or ability of brains to naturally adapt to our experiences.” [Public Release, Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, March 22, 2017.] It is reasonable to assume that Dickinson, suffering from diminishment of her eyesight, may have experienced a degree of such enhancements herself.

§§§§ Louisa Norcross was twenty-two at the time she lived in Mrs. Bangs’s Boarding House, and her sister Frances was sixteen. Emily Dickinson was thirty-three.

¶¶¶¶ The Springfield Republican ran the complete text of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in its November 20, 1863, edition. The newspaper praised Lincoln’s speech, declaring, “His little speech is a perfect gem; deep in feeling, compact in thought and expression, and tasteful and elegant in every word and comma. Then it has the merit of unexpectedness in its verbal perfection and beauty.” Surely the praise for Lincoln’s address would have resonated with Dickinson. [Walter L. Powell, “‘So Clear of Victory’: Emily Dickinson’s Gettysburg Address.” November 9, 2013, Lecture at the Amherst History Museum, sponsored by the Emily Dickinson Museum.]

#### Images of eyes, seeing, and sight became one of Dickinson’s most frequently used tropes. Their frequency is her poetic lexicon—over three-hundred references—is topped only by pronouns and words such as “day,” “know,” “away,” “more,” “sun,” “life,” and “never.” [“Index Words in Order of Frequency,” in A Concordance to the Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. S. P. Rosenbaum (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964), 865.]