Ten

CALLED BACK

Saturday, May 15, 1886 9 p.m. Thermometer 55.2. Rain/Snow 0. Clouds 0. Winds 0. Thermometer Attached to Barometer 72.1. Dry Bulb 55.3. Wet Bulb 54.5. Force of Vapor .411. Humidity 93.

—Sabra Snell, The Meteorological Journal Kept at Amherst College

Alone at her desk at night, Emily looked up and stared into the darkness. Even as she approached fifty, Emily continued to write at night. Sometimes the sound of the wind woke her, or her invalid mother called out from another room or a thought intruded on her sleep and wouldn’t let go. Once roused, Emily would walk ten steps to her desk, light a lamp, and get to work. The only sound interrupting her solitude was the scratch of mice going after candy Vinnie kept on the top kitchen shelf.¹ “Time, why Time was all I wanted!” Emily was fond of saying, even if the hours she snatched were in the middle of the night.* After her father’s death, Emily told Higginson that nothing had changed—at least externally.² She still had her mother and Vinnie. Austin, Sue, and their three children remained next door at the Evergreens. But there were internal changes—profound ones. Everything now seemed more tenuous, as if the world Emily had once known could disappear in a flash or at least not be the same as it was. In the days following Edward Dickinson’s death, Emily said she did not—at first—feel “danger.” She didn’t feel much of anything, wandering around in a daze and all but unconscious. But the sense of threat came later in what she called the after, slower days.³ Emily fixed her gaze out the western window and tried to discern what was before her. In the dark, the pupils in her brown eyes grew large, trying to absorb light. She could barely see the ghostly line of hemlocks, the tall oak tree, and the edge of the veranda where Sue liked to be alone with her thoughts.⁴ At night the glass in Emily’s window turned into a mirror, reflecting her face as much as it did the shadows before her. She did not turn away as others might have, those who claimed there was nothing to see. For Emily, there was always something to see, even in the dark—especially in the dark. Years earlier she had imagined groping her way across a pitch-black landscape without the benefit of light or moon or good eyes. “We grow accustomed to the Dark – ” the poem began.

Either the Darkness alters –

Or something in the sight

Adjusts itself to Midnight – .⁵

As much as Emily refused to turn away, she could not see what was coming, including her own death. Before that spring day in 1886, there would be unimaginable loss, a surprising kindling of romantic love, and—up until the end—more poems.

On too many nights as Emily stared out the window, lamps suddenly blazed inside the Evergreens, and her reflection would vanish. When the space between the two houses flooded with light, Emily knew it was happening again. Ned, her older nephew, was ill. Austin would awaken to a violent shaking, as if heavy wagons were passing on the road and sending reverberations throughout the house. He’d run into Ned’s room to find his fifteen-year-old son moaning and gasping for breath. Nothing could make the seizures stop as Austin tried to hold his son and keep Ned from biting his tongue. The boy cried out, foamed at the mouth, and his whole body contorted with spasms.⁶ After the first seizure in 1877, Austin and Sue stood watch over their son the entire night, and sent for the doctor first thing in the morning. The physician examined the young man and believed the convulsions were related to a heart condition, possibly triggered by Ned’s earlier bout with rheumatism. He did not expect the seizures to reoccur and Austin and Sue eased, thinking the previous night’s scare was the end of it. But then the convulsions returned. In his diary, Austin kept track of each episode, and noted the way his son’s eyes darkened hours before an attack. Epilepsy, the doctor said. Austin was devastated, saying Ned is “sick with rheumatism and most everything else.”⁷ Neighbors found Sue distracted, nervous, and exhausted—“unstrung,” a friend said.⁸ One night, when Emily once again saw the Evergreens’ lamps burning in the middle of the night, she darted over to the house. Her niece, Mattie, caught a glimpse of her out a window by the rosebushes. “’Is he better?’” Emily whispered. Startled to see her aunt alone at that hour, Mattie could only nod. But before Mattie could get to the door to let her in, Emily had disappeared.⁹ Later she made pies, wrote poems to Ned, and sent over the season’s first batch of maple sugar.¹⁰ She may have thought that the sense of danger she had been living with was a premonition of Ned’s epilepsy. But the fright over her nephew was only the beginning.

Tragedy struck Samuel Bowles next. “Dear Mr Bowles found out too late,” Emily wrote, “that Vitality costs itself.”¹¹ Years of hard work, travel, and late hours editing the Springfield Republican had sapped his energy and taxed his body. Everyone—even Bowles himself—suspected it. Once, after visiting Emily, Bowles sent her a note: “I hope I may oftener come face to face with you. I have little spare strength or time for writing.”¹² He died January 16, 1878, of apoplexy at age fifty-one. When she thought of him, Emily could still see the sparkle of his eyes—“those isolated comets”—and thought his countenance the “most triumphant Face out of Paradise.”¹³ Bowles loved purple hues, and in the afternoon, when Emily looked east to the Pelham Hills, she thought—there’s Sam’s color.¹⁴ After Bowles, death took his friend and coeditor, Josiah Holland. Holland and Bowles had been Emily’s earliest literary champions, publishing her valentine and asking for more work from the promising young writer. A heart attack ended Holland’s life on October 12, 1881, and his family notified Emily by telegram. During one of her restive nights, Emily pulled open a drawer, where she kept a memorial edition Scribner’s had published as a tribute to Dr. Holland. “It shall always remain there – nearest us,” she wrote his wife. She recalled one brilliantly clear morning when, after a visit, Holland placed one hand on Vinnie’s head and another on Emily’s, and said he would always remember the sunshine around them.¹⁵ “The Things that never can come back, are several,” Emily wrote Elizabeth Holland

Childhood – some forms of Hope – the Dead –

Though Joys – like Men – may sometimes make a Journey –

And still abide – ¹⁶

In April 1882, it was Charles Wadsworth, Emily’s mysterious minister from Philadelphia. A few years earlier, he had appeared unannounced on the Homestead steps and rang the bell, asking Margaret if he could see Miss Dickinson. Vinnie had heard him enter the front hall and rushed to alert her sister, who was in her garden conservatory. “The Gentleman with the deep voice wants to see you, Emily,” she said.¹⁷ Dickinson was surprised, even startled, to find him in Amherst, let alone in her own home. She asked why he had not told her he was coming, and he replied that he hardly knew himself. “I stepped from my Pulpit . . . to the Train,” he said.¹⁸ Earlier, Wadsworth had remarked that he was liable to die at any time, but Emily had not taken him literally: he had always been opaque. But now that he was dead of pneumonia at age sixty-seven, she wanted to know more about his life and sought out others who knew him. She located a mutual acquaintance in Brooklyn and asked him questions: Did Wadsworth have brothers and sisters, what did he say on his deathbed, do either of his sons have his remarkable face, does his daughter regret her “flight from her loved Father”?¹⁹ For a man she considered “my closest earthly friend,” Emily knew strikingly little about him.²⁰ She shared her skepticism about heaven with his New York friend. “Are you certain there is another life?” she asked. “When overwhelmed to know, I fear that few are sure.”²¹

Seven months later, Emily’s mother died. Emily Norcross Dickinson’s death on November 14, 1882, was not a surprise. A larger mother had died before, Emily said, thinking of the neuralgia, the depression, the stroke, and the broken hip that had plagued the seventy-eight-year-old woman and limited her life.²² In many ways her passing was a blessing—both for the suffering Mrs. Dickinson and the steadfast daughters who cared for her. Emily admitted she and her mother had not always been close. “But Mines in the same Ground meet by tunneling,” she wrote, “and when she became our Child, the Affection came.”²³ The day before Mrs. Dickinson died, she had seemed better, and Emily fed her mother beef tea, custard, and lemonade.²⁴ The next morning, after being lifted from bed to chair, Mrs. Dickinson admired a cluster of grapes a friend had sent, called out for Vinnie not to leave her, then gasped and died. Her funeral was a simple one. Amherst shops did not close as they had for her husband. There were no Boston dignitaries present. To the few who saw Emily the day of her mother’s service, the poet looked pale and worn.²⁵ “There was no earthly parting,” Emily wrote her Norcross cousins. “She slipped from our fingers like a flake gathered by the wind, and is now part of the drift called ‘the infinite.’ We don’t know where she is, though so many tell us. I believe we shall in some manner be cherished by our Maker – that the One who gave us this remarkable earth has the power still farther to surprise that which He has caused. Beyond that all is silence.”²⁶ When she looked back over the many years her mother had been ill, Emily had one regret: She wished her mother had been better friends with the sky. Nature had always been Emily’s preferred companion. “That is ‘sociability,’” she wrote, “that is fine and deathless.”²⁷ Even while expected, her mother’s death left Emily chilled. It was always that way with her: when grief or terror struck, Emily turned to ice. “Her dying feels to me like many kinds of Cold,” she wrote, “at times electric, at times benumbing – then a trackless waste.”²⁸ The poet was right, though, in suspecting that life might still surprise. In the months after her mother’s death, Emily Dickinson fell in love.

Otis Phillips Lord was a justice on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. An Amherst College graduate, former politician, and staunch old-school Whig, he was recognized for being forceful, high-minded, and at times stiff. He had known Emily since she was a girl and—as one of Edward Dickinson’s closest friends—he had often visited the family. Once at the Dickinsons’ dinner table, he had spontaneously launched into the somber hymn “My Thoughts on Awful Subjects Rolls.” Sue and Vinnie could barely contain their amusement, and Vinnie diffused the awkward moment with her own rendition of a more uplifting psalm. Judge Lord might not have minded their giggles. In private moments he exhibited a warm sense of humor, and he and Emily had fun swapping droll newspaper stories.

NOTICE!

My wife Sophia Pickles having left my bed and board without just cause or provocation, I shall not be responsible for bills of her contracting.

SOLOMON PICKLES

NOTICE!

I take this means of saying that Solomon Pickles has had no bed or board for me to leave for the last two months.

SOPHIA PICKLES²⁹

When their relationship began around 1882, Judge Lord was seventy years old, a widower with no children, a resident of Salem, and eighteen years Emily’s senior. She called him “my Church,” and letters to him were filled with affection.³⁰ Judge Lord’s legal work brought him to nearby Northampton twice a year, and he often stayed in Amherst accompanied by nieces who kept house for him. Perhaps Emily felt a newfound sense of freedom after so many years focused on her mother’s care. Perhaps she finally was ready to open herself to the vulnerabilities of love. While Emily and Otis did not see each other often, they exchanged weekly letters—missives that Emily took care in drafting and kept copies of in her room. Whether she mailed all the letters she drafted was unclear. What was certain, however, was her passion. “My lovely Salem smiles at me,” she wrote. “I seek his Face so often . . . I confess that I love him – I rejoice that I love him – I thank the maker of Heaven and Earth that gave him me to love – the exultation floods me – I cannot find my channel – The Creek turns to Sea – at thought of thee.”³¹ When the time was right, she said she would lift the bars and lay him in the moss.³² Yet as much as Emily poured out her love, she also held back. “Dont you know you are happiest while I withhold and not confer,” she wrote. “Dont you know that ‘No’ is the wildest word we consign to Language?”³³ Soon after Emily pledged her love, Judge Lord asked her to marry him—or seemed to.† “You said with loved timidity in asking me to your dear Home, you would ‘try not to make it unpleasant.’ So delicate a diffidence,” she wrote.³⁴ She played with writing her name as if they were married, first joking about his reference to her slight frame. “Emily ‘Jumbo’! Sweetest name, but I know a sweeter – Emily Jumbo Lord.”³⁵

But Judge Lord’s health was precarious. Shortly after his relationship with Emily began, Vinnie and Austin read in the newspaper that he had collapsed. Vinnie asked Emily if she had seen the paper and when she said no, her sister broke the news. Again Emily felt the cold grip of panic take hold and her sight blurred. When Tom Kelley, a family workman, appeared at the door, Emily ran to his blue jacket.³⁶ Miraculously, Otis Lord recovered and he and Emily returned to their correspondence. “The love I feel for you, I mean, your own for me [is] a treasure I still keep,” she wrote in rare stumbling formality.³⁷ There never would be a marriage or anything as official as an engagement. The thought of uprooting Emily Dickinson to Salem was unrealistic. Amherst ran too deep in her veins. She may also have thought that marriage came at too high a price, as if it would distract from her poetry or impede words. “Sleeplessness makes my Pencil stumble,” she wrote Judge Lord one night. “Affection clogs it – too.”³⁸ She preferred to live in a familiar place—as fearsome and eruptive as it was. In a poem she shared with no one, she described living on a precipice.

Volcanoes be in Sicily

And South America

I judge from my Geography

Volcanoes nearer here

A Lava step at any time

Am I inclined to climb

A Crater I may contemplate

Vesuvius at Home³⁹

Around 1882, Austin also fell in love. But unlike Emily’s relationship with Judge Lord, Austin’s love affair was clandestine and eventually tore the family apart. Mabel Loomis Todd had moved with her husband, David, to Amherst in the autumn of 1881. David Todd was the new professor of astronomy at Amherst College and his twenty-five-year-old wife became the toast of the town—or so Mabel would be the first to tell anyone. She was a beautiful young woman, lively and talented. Upon her arrival in Amherst, she became a close friend of Susan’s. Mrs. Austin Dickinson is the “real society person here,” Mabel gushed, and said Sue’s presence filled every room with grace and elegance.⁴⁰ Mabel started spending time in Austin and Sue’s drawing room, playing the piano and singing. Ned, only five years younger than Mabel, was smitten. Austin’s fascination went deeper. Austin and Mabel took walks alone and she found him dignified, if also a little odd.⁴¹ Vinnie and Emily were impressed with the newcomer, although the poet declined to see her as she did most everyone else. When Mabel played the piano for the Dickinson sisters at the Homestead, Emily would listen from the top of the stairs and send down a glass of wine or a poem. Mabel found Austin’s mysterious sister captivating. “I must tell you about the character of Amherst,” she wrote her parents. “It is a lady whom the people call the Myth.” According to town gossip, she said, Emily had not been out of the house in fifteen years and never saw anyone. She allowed children to visit once in a while or would lower treats to them from her window. She dressed totally in white, had a brilliant mind, and wrote beautifully. “Isn’t that like a book?” she said.”⁴² Sue shared some of Emily’s poems with Mabel, and Mrs. Todd wrote them down to study at home. She was seriously interested and called the poems “full of power.”⁴³ David Todd often was away from Amherst on astronomical expeditions, and was rumored to have romantic affairs of his own.⁴⁴ On a picnic to nearby Sunderland one day, Austin told Mabel he wanted to be buried where crickets would forever chirp around him. She was transported. He is “a true, if silent, poet,” she confided in her diary, and declared fifty-three-year-old Austin Dickinson was “almost in every particular my ideal man.”⁴⁵ By 1883, after Mabel returned from an out-of-town trip, Sue’s cordiality turned to hostility. She’d learned that Austin and Mabel had become lovers, with at least the tacit acknowledgment of his sisters, and perhaps others in town. Vinnie sided with Austin and barely spoke to Sue. She urged Mabel to rise above her sister-in-law’s icy behavior.⁴⁶ Ned was furious with his father, started smoking, and told Mattie that all he wanted was one day to have a house of his own where his mother could live in peace. “No fame, no brains, no family, no scholarship, No Anything.”⁴⁷ Sue let her unhappiness spill over and told her daughter that the time might come when she would not be there for her children. Hope “lies far behind me,” she said.⁴⁸ Emily tried to stay above the rancor and not choose sides. She continued to send notes to Sue and stirred berries over a kettle to send over to the Evergreens.⁴⁹ But she rarely saw Sue: the berries would be delivered to the house by someone else, and a family stableman let Emily know if Mrs. Dickinson seemed weary. Emily did not check on Susan herself, and—too worn by the ruin around her—Sue apparently did the same. “Whom not seeing I still love,” Sue wrote in a book inscribed to Emily, and sent across the path between the houses.⁵⁰

Constancy for Emily was her poems. She continued to work, and started corresponding with the new champion of her verses, Thomas Niles. Mr. Niles was the Roberts Brothers publisher and Helen Hunt Jackson’s great friend. After the publication of A Masque of Poets, Niles had expressed admiration for Dickinson’s work. Emily knew Helen had been praising her poems and had urged the publisher to consider publishing a Dickinson volume. “The kind but incredible opinion of ‘H. H.’ and yourself I would like to deserve,” Emily wrote the Boston publisher.⁵¹ But she then played her usual trick with people who sought to bring her work to the public: she didn’t say yes and she didn’t say no. She did, however, send Niles more poems, a clear indication that she wanted to keep the door open. Just as she had twenty years before with her first letter to Mr. Higginson, Emily sorted through the many poems in her room—forty fascicles and hundreds of loose poems now, some old verses that she loved and some new ones she had been working on. She selected a few. While the quantity of her poems had been reduced over the years, she still produced around thirty or so new poems a year—and the quality of the work had not diminished. Her methods never altered; there were always drafts, alternate phrasings, and endless revisions. And even as she aged, her subject matter remained the same: poems about love, immortality, death and—always—nature. There were some wonderful new poems she wanted to share with Mr. Niles—verses as good as any she had ever written. She chose one to send, and off it went to Boston—a poem about a hummingbird.

A Route of Evanescence,

With a revolving Wheel –

A Resonance of Emerald

A Rush of Cochineal –

And every Blossom on the Bush

Adjusts it’s tumbled Head –

The Mail from Tunis – probably,

An easy Morning’s Ride – ⁵²

When Emily received Niles’s reply, she was pleased with his reaction—happy that the poem with its burst of color and whirl of motion had captured the essence of the bird. Earlier he had admired a poem she had sent about a blue jay, remarking that the verse seemed true to him.⁵³ Commending one of her poems for being true was the highest praise anyone could offer Emily. Encouraged, she sent him another. It was one of her older poems, a verse she had shared with Higginson seventeen years earlier. She had reworked the stanzas many times and looked over the elegy again.

Further in Summer than the Birds –

Pathetic from the Grass

A minor Nation celebrates

It’s unobtrusive Mass –

No Ordinance be seen –

So gradual the Grace

A gentle Custom it becomes –

Enlarging Loneliness –

Antiquest felt at Noon

When August burning low

Arise this Spectral Canticle

Repose to typify –

Remit as yet to Grace –

No furrow on the Glow –

But a Druidic Difference

Enhances Nature now – ⁵⁴

For the woman who more than once had called herself a pagan, the poem celebrated the natural world—beginning low in the grass with chirping crickets and ending in the ancient realm of the Druids. It captured the haunting sounds of autumn and moved with the same majestic sweep she had achieved in “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers.” She knew the cricket’s lonely August chant made one sense a difference that could be felt, but not named. Conjuring up the ineffable was, after all, her territory. “My Cricket,” Emily announced in presenting the poem to Mr. Niles.⁵⁵ Niles wrote back enthusiastically, saying he had read and reread the poems she was sending. Could Roberts Brothers publish a collection of her verse, he boldly asked. “That is, if you want to give them to the world through the medium of a publisher.”⁵⁶ Mrs. Jackson had already acquainted Mr. Niles with Dickinson’s reluctance.

After their many conversations over A Masque of Poets, Emily and Helen had forged a close relationship. Dickinson had also sent her friend the hummingbird poem and a bluebird one, which Helen had committed to memory. “That is more than I do of any of my own verses,” Jackson said.⁵⁷ They also enjoyed sparring over poems, and when Helen all but dared Emily to write a poem about an oriole, Emily fired one back in her next letter. “One of the ones that Midas touched,” it began.⁵⁸ While still spending her days writing, Helen had all but left poetry behind. Another occupation had overtaken her. On a recent trip out west, she had been appalled by the living conditions of Ponca Indians and was attending political meetings to protest their poor treatment by the US government. The work consumed her, and she wrote to a friend that someday she would be found dead with “Indians” engraved on her brain.⁵⁹ She vowed to write a serious political treatise pointing out the government’s injustice. The title for the book came to her suddenly, she said, “as if someone spoke them aloud in the room.”⁶⁰ In 1881 she published A Century of Dishonor, and gave copies at her own expense to every senator and congressman in Washington.⁶¹ Two years later President Chester Arthur appointed her a special agent of the department in charge of surveying the needs of Mission Indians in Southern California. Not only was Helen absorbed with her government report, she also had a flickering idea for a novel. She already had a name for the book—Ramona—and told her old friend Colonel Higginson, “If I could write a story that would do for the Indian a thousandth part of what Uncle Tom’s Cabin did for the Negro, I would be thankful the rest of my life.” ⁶² Helen was so focused on her work that she let her correspondence with Emily slip, and Dickinson nudged her with a note and a photograph of her young nephew Gib. The young boy had captured Emily’s heart and that of everyone else around him. He had the unusual ability to bring out the best in people, even his warring parents. Once, on his birthday, he marched around the Dickinson grounds with a band of friends, beating drums and waving party hats. His aunt leaned out the window and applauded.⁶³ Emily hoped Helen would love the little boy as much as she did and told her to keep the photograph.

The last half of 1883 proved to be ruthless. Austin and Sue argued to the point of oblivion and Austin promised Mabel he would straighten things out or “smash the machine.”⁶⁴ In late September Gib had been outdoors, riding his velocipede around town and splashing in puddles with friends. Within two days he became mysteriously ill—seriously so. Sue and Austin hovered over their eight-year-old child as the little boy’s fever soared. Mabel waited for Austin to come round with news. She wrote in her diary that doctors suspected typhoid or malarial fever.⁶⁵ In the early morning hours of October 5, Emily crept over to the Evergreens to see what she could do. She had not been in the house in years. By the time she saw him, Gib was hallucinating, sweating, and thrashing in bed. The stringent smell of disinfectant sitting in buckets around the house made Emily’s stomach churn. While she wanted to stay, her physical distress would not allow it. Her head throbbed and she vomited. Emily had to get out of the house, and she rushed back home across the dark path. As the night wore on, Gib’s condition worsened. “Open the Door, open the Door,” he cried in delirium. “They are waiting for me.”⁶⁶ By five o’clock the next evening, he was dead. A neighbor observed that the Dickinson family—once the symbol of Amherst’s vitality and strength—seemed to collapse overnight.⁶⁷ Sue shut the door and saw no one. A doctor treated Vinnie for exhaustion. Austin was nearly dead, Mabel wrote in her diary. “Gilbert was his idol, and the only thing in his house which truly loved him.”⁶⁸ Emily lay in her bed unable to move. “Who were waiting for him,” she asked herself, “all we possess we would give to know.”⁶⁹

Somehow Emily managed to write. Her letter of condolence to Sue was astonishing, drawing on the full power of her genius. She had never written a more beautiful epistle and she had never more keenly felt the triumph of life over death. That she was able to find words at all was remarkable.

Dear Sue –

The Vision of Immortal Life has been fulfilled –

How simply at the last the Fathom comes! The Passenger and not the Sea, we find surprises us –

Gilbert rejoiced in Secrets –

His Life was panting with them – With what menace of Light he cried “Dont tell, Aunt Emily”! Now my ascended Playmate must instruct me. Show us, prattling Preceptor, but the way to thee!

He knew no niggard moment – His Life was full of Boon – The Playthings of the Dervish were not so wild as his –

No crescent was this Creature – He traveled from the Full –

Such soar, but never set –

I see him in the Star, and meet his sweet velocity in everything that flies – His Life was like the Bugle, which winds itself away, his Elegy an echo – his Requiem ecstasy –

Dawn and Meridian in one.

Wherefore would we wait, wronged only of Night, which he left for us –

Without a speculation, our little Ajax spans the whole –

Pass to thy Rendezvous of Light,

Pangless except for us –

Who slowly ford the Mystery

Which thou hast leaped across!

Emily⁷⁰

Later, Sue asked Emily if she would always be beside her. “The first section of Darkness is the densest, Dear,” Emily replied. “After that, Light trembles in – You asked would I remain? Irrevocably, Susan – I know no other way.”⁷¹

The next year, Judge Lord died. A stroke killed the seventy-five-year-old jurist in 1884 while he was reading the newspaper, searching perhaps for articles to send Emily. “Dear Mr Lord has left us,” Emily wrote a friend. “After a brief unconsciousness, a Sleep that ended with a smile, so his Nieces tell us.”⁷² On her way to bed, Emily would stop before a portrait of Otis. She looked at his curly white hair, his stern expression much like her father’s—a face not so much dignified as wanting to appear so. If she had not loved his expression, Emily said, she would have feared it. His face “had such ascension.”⁷³ She once asked Judge Lord what she should do for him after he died. “Remember Me,’” he had said.⁷⁴ She took out her pencil as if in reply.

Go thy great way!

The Stars thou meetst

Are even as Thyself –

For what are Stars but Asterisks

To point a human Life?⁷⁵

On June 14, 1884, three months after Judge Lord died, Emily was in the kitchen at noon making a cake, when suddenly a great darkness came over her. She fainted and did not recover consciousness until evening. When she came to, Austin, Vinnie, and a physician were standing over her. Emily thought she was dying or already was dead—“all was so kind and hallowed,” she said.⁷⁶ The poet had never fainted in her life, and for weeks she was bedridden until strong enough to sit a few hours in a chair. The doctor’s diagnosis was “revenge of the nerves,” and he prescribed sedatives, tinctures for headaches, and a syrup of French lettuce.⁷⁷ Emily had her own diagnosis. “The Dyings have been too deep for me,” she said.⁷⁸ Two months later, while back home in Colorado, Helen Hunt Jackson fell down a flight of stairs and broke her leg. Emily saw the notice in the Republican and wrote her friend immediately. “It was not quite a ‘massacre,’” Helen replied with her usual pluck. “But it was a very bad break – two inches of the big bone smashed in – & the little one snapped: as compound a fracture as is often compounded!”⁷⁹ She assured Emily she was all right, managing well on crutches, and confident she would be walking soon with a cane. It was merely an involuntary rest cure she told her.⁸⁰ Helen did need the rest. She had finished her Indian novel in three months, faster than anything she had ever written.⁸¹ Ramona caused a sensation and sold 15,000 copies in a matter of months. Thomas Niles was ecstatic. “My life-blood went into it,” Helen wrote her publisher, “all that I had thought, felt, and suffered for five years on the Indian Question.”⁸² Perhaps thinking the California climate would help her recover, Helen hired a nurse and took rooms in a Los Angeles boardinghouse. She described for Emily the view from her bed. “I am looking straight off towards Japan – over a silver sea – my foreground is a strip of high grass, and mallows, with a row of Eucalyptus trees sixty or seventy feet high.”⁸³ But Helen did not improve. Sick as she was, she still thought about Dickinson’s verse—was still praising it, and still admonishing Emily for not sharing it with the world. “I wish I knew what your portfolios, by this time, hold,” she wrote.⁸⁴ While a doctor treated her for malaria, he suspected stomach cancer was the underlying cause. He wired William Jackson in Colorado and told him to come at once. By the time Helen’s husband arrived, it was nearly too late. When he saw her, William broke into pieces.⁸⁵ For all her ceaseless wanderings, Helen had proved to be the perfect match for William Sharpless Jackson. He adored her passion for life, her independence, her love of adventure, and what he called her “too muchness.”⁸⁶ When Emily received word that Helen had died on August 12, 1885, she wrote Mr. Jackson. “Helen of Troy will die, but Helen of Colorado, never,” she said. “Dear friend, can you walk, were the last words that I wrote her. Dear friend, I can fly—her immortal (soaring) reply.”⁸⁷

Dickinson never fully recovered. Fainting in the kitchen was the beginning of the end. Three months after Helen’s death, she was again confined to her bed. She read, wrote letters, and on occasion drafted a poem. She worked on one about Helen, returning again to the image of stars and asterisks. “Did you not give her to me?” she wrote Higginson.⁸⁸ By the beginning of the year in 1886, Emily’s family kept close watch over her. Austin canceled travel plans to Boston in order to be near, and he and Vinnie had a serious talk about their sister’s health. A neighbor looked up at the big yellow house sitting behind the hemlock hedge and said everything was dark.⁸⁹ Inside Emily was thinking of flowers, Reverend Wadsworth, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Helen Hunt Jackson, and nurturing what she called a “pink and russet hope.”⁹⁰ Years earlier she had dashed off a note to her Norcross cousins, telling them they had left something behind after a visit at the Homestead. Loo had forgotten a tumbler of sweet peas on top of a bureau, and Emily had an idea about what to do with them. She proposed leaving the flowers in the bureau drawer until they had withered and made pods. They’ll sow themselves in the dark, she wrote, and be ready to blossom later on.⁹¹ It was like that now in her room. That spring as she looked around her chamber, everything Emily had sown was blossoming. All the fascicles stitched with thread, all poems hiding in dark drawers. Nearly 2,000 verses in all.‡ There was a long-ago note from the college boy who printed her first valentine, inviting her to a candy pull—with a poem on the back. “Corn,” “Wheat,” “Ice Cream” scrawled on pieces of paper—and poems on the reverse. A fragment of an old Amherst Academy penmanship lesson with a verse scribbled across it. An envelope with the flap opened to resemble a peaked roof—“The way Hope builds his House” written inside.⁹² Nearly everything she touched became a surface on which to write or a poem itself. Blossoming sweet peas. And there were letters—hundreds and thousands of letters written to Emily over a lifetime, and drafts of her own. The mysterious Master Letters were there too. If Reverend Wadsworth were the intended recipient of those agonizing missives, the poet did not say. From her bed, Emily could see the sun dipping radiant and alive beyond farmhouses to the west. She would remember the singsong of phoebes and the smell of mud when farmers turned over the soil in the spring. She would recall Gilbert’s uncomplicated joy and the way he tipped his cap. She could see her brother at his happiest, planting azaleas and little oaks from the Pelham Hills, and feel Vinnie’s ferocious loyalty. She could hear her father’s triumphant “Amen” after morning prayers, smell her mother’s warm doughnuts. And Carlo, always big, beloved Carlo looking out the window, padding near her. The round, fragrant orange on the dining-room sideboard. The soft folds of the Springfield Republican lying unopened on a chair in the library. The pink roses of her chamber wallpaper, the smell of hyacinths on the windowsill, the afternoon light that fell across on her desk, shining like the lustrous tail of a comet streaming just out of sight. “Should you ask what happened here,” she had written, “I should say nothing perceptible. Sweet latent events – too shy to confide.”⁹³

It had been raining and cloudy in Amherst the second week of May 1886. When the showers finally let up and the sun started shining, strawberries all over the Connecticut River Valley turned red. Frank Wood would have the first of the season for his customers. He always did, unloading big crates of berries at his dining room in the center of town.⁹⁴ Across the Notch in South Hadley, Mount Holyoke Female Seminary principal Miss Blanchard was counting heads; fifteen students from Mount Holyoke would be spending an afternoon at Amherst College’s art museum. If the weather continued to hold, clerks from Phoenix Row would play a game of baseball with the nine from the local hat shops.⁹⁵ Everything in Amherst that May was about baseball. In his diary, Austin kept track of Emily’s declining health. “Emily feeling poorly—and so I have kept within her call,” he wrote on May 13.⁹⁶ Sometime earlier Dickinson had written a note to Fanny and Loo Norcross. “Little Cousins, Called back. Emily.” Five words. Three lines. Nine beats. 4-2-3. Her final poem.⁹⁷ On Saturday evening May 15, 1886 as choir practice was beginning across the street at First Church, Emily took her last breath. Austin’s diary told the story. “It was settled before morning broke that Emily would not wake again this side. The day was awful. She ceased to breathe that terrible breathing just before the whistles sounded for six. Mrs Montague and Mrs Jameson were sitting with Vin. I was near by.”⁹⁸ That night the last vestiges of the week’s clouds disappeared, and the sky over Amherst was clear. Ned, Mattie, and Gib loved studying the heavens and even had a favorite star, Algol. The night Emily died the stars were especially brilliant. The moon was almost full and in the south, Jupiter and Mars were shining brightly. Barely visible and just above the horizon, Algol started to rise, like an asterisk.⁹⁹

“DYING IS A wild Night and a new Road,” Emily had written.¹⁰⁰ She knew well the chill aftermath of death: the stillness, the numbness, the nerves sitting “ceremonious, like Tombs.”¹⁰¹ Austin and Lavinia went over instructions Emily had left. Mr. Higginson should be contacted in Cambridge. Ask him to read Emily Brontë’s poem at the funeral. All papers should be burned. A simple coffin. A brief service at home. No hearse. The family’s Irish workmen as pallbearers. Austin summoned undertaker Edwin Marsh, who took Dickinson’s final measure. “Death: May 15. Funeral to take place: May 19. Place of Funeral: House. Length to Heel: 5 feet 6 inches.” Dr. Bigelow completed the physician’s certificate: Bright’s disease. Length of illness—2 1/2 years.§ The town clerk added the remaining facts. Twenty-second death of the year in Amherst. Female, single. Fifty-five years. Five months and five days. Occupation: At Home.¹⁰²

In the end, Susan was there. “The tie between us is very fine,” Emily had written her most treasured friend, “but a Hair never dissolves.”¹⁰³ “Thank you, dear Sue – for every solace,” she had written before her death, and another: “Dear Sue, Thanky,” the last two letters never finished.¹⁰⁴ Sue took care of the most intimate of duties. She arranged for the local seamstress to sew a white flannel robe in which to wrap Emily’s body. “When we come into the world we are wrapped in soft, white flannel,” Sue said. “I think it fitting that we should leave it that way.”¹⁰⁵ She then went to work on the obituary for the newspaper. She wanted to make sure people understood Emily’s seclusion was not a rejection of the world or them. She wanted to stress that Emily’s faith was not repudiation of God, but of dogma. And she wanted to declare that Emily’s words were unparalleled—gleaming, startling, and rapturous.

The death of Miss Emily Dickinson, daughter of the late Edward Dickinson, at Amherst on Saturday, makes another sad inroad on the small circle so long occupying the old family mansion. It was for a long generation overlooked by death, and one passing in and out there thought of old-fashioned times, when parents and children grew up and passed maturity together, in lives of singular uneventfulness . . . Very few in the village, except among the older inhabitants, knew Miss Emily personally, although the facts of her seclusion and her intellectual brilliancy were familiar Amherst traditions. . . . As she passed on in life, her sensitive nature shrank from much personal contact with the world, and more and more turned to her own large wealth of individual resources for companionship, sitting thenceforth, as some one said of her, “in the light of her own fire.” Not disappointed with the world, not an invalid until within the past two years, not from any lack of sympathy, not because she was insufficient for any mental work or social career—her endowments being so exceptional—but the “mesh of her soul,” as Browning calls the body, was too rare, and the sacred quiet of her own home proved the fit atmosphere for her worth and work. All that must be inviolate.¹⁰⁶

That Wednesday afternoon, May 19, the funeral service took place in the Dickinsons’ family library. “To Amherst to the funeral of that rare & strange creature Emily Dickinson,” Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote in his diary. When he looked down at Emily’s face in the coffin, he was astonished. She looked like a young woman. There was not a gray hair or a wrinkle. Vinnie bent over beside him and placed two heliotropes by Emily’s hand. To “take to Judge Lord,” she whispered. ¹⁰⁷ The funeral was as simple and plain as Emily had wanted. As instructed, Mr. Higginson read lines from Emily Brontë’s poem. But before he did, he added a few words of his own: “Our friend who has just now put on Immortality, and who seemed scarce ever to have taken it off,” he said.¹⁰⁸ Then he began, “No coward soul is mine / No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere.” Higginson looked around at Edward Dickinson’s old books that still lined the library shelves and smelled springtime blossoms drifting from Emily’s conservatory. The first time he had been in the house was a quarter of a century earlier, when he’d listened as Emily spoke with barely a pause about puddings and clocks and how a poem made her feel. So cold no fire ever can warm me, he remembered her saying.¹⁰⁹ He thought about one question she had asked him that memorable afternoon—a question that at the time was so odd and perplexing he wrote it down: “Could you tell me what home is,” she had inquired.¹¹⁰ The answer seemed simple to him. Home was this very house that she loved with all her heart. Home was Amherst. Better than heaven, she said. But Higginson now knew that’s not what Dickinson meant. Home to her was much more. It was the wild terrain of her mind. A world of hummingbirds and crickets and alabaster and dots on a disc of snow. To Emily Dickinson, home was consciousness itself—a continent of language where metaphor was her native tongue.

I dwell in Possibility –

A fairer House than Prose –

More numerous of Windows –

Superior – for Doors –

Of Chambers as the Cedars –

Impregnable of eye –

And for an everlasting Roof

The Gambrels of the Sky –

Of Visitors – the fairest –

For Occupation – This –

The spreading wide my narrow Hands

To gather Paradise – ¹¹¹

No one who attended her funeral that day knew Emily Dickinson would become someone else after death. Or that Vinnie would find her cache of poems and not have the heart to burn them.¹¹² No one knew that several years later Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd would approach Thomas Niles at Roberts Brothers in Boston with hundreds of her verses—surely enough for a volume, they thought. No one knew that the book Mr. Niles would publish in 1890 would sell faster and wider than anyone ever could have imagined. No one knew in the centuries that followed that Dickinson would be proclaimed one of the greatest poets in the English language. All the small group of people who gathered in the family library knew was that Emily Dickinson would be laid to rest next to her parents in the village cemetery. Undertaker Marsh was waiting for them. Sue had made sure the new grave was lined with pine boughs. Across town that afternoon Sabra Snell collected details to enter in her father’s weather journal: Temperature 66. A few clouds. Light breeze.¹¹³ It was a beautiful day. Buttercups and violets dotted the grass. At the backdoor of the Homestead, Austin, Sue, Vinnie, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson watched as half a dozen Irish workmen lifted Emily’s coffin. Then the quiet procession headed out past the barn, across the fields, and into the light.

* The remark was a paraphrase from Robert Browning’s poem “Any Wife to Any Husband.” [Jane Donahue Eberwein, Dickinson: Strategies of Limitation (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), 92.]

† All but one of the letters from Otis Lord were burned after Dickinson’s death. Lord’s words to the poet are inferred from the drafts of letters she left behind that ended up in Austin’s possession, and eventually with Mabel Loomis Todd.

‡ Dickinson did not retain all of the poems she wrote. Some were sent to correspondents without an original kept in the poet’s possession. In the late twentieth century after all of the known poems were collected, most scholars believe Dickinson wrote just under 1,800 poems. That number fluctuates depending on how scholars define a poem. Some phrases embedded in letters are counted as poems by some scholars, and not by others.

§ Bright’s disease was a general term for kidney ailments. Given Dickinson’s headaches, fainting spell, and family history, it would appear she also suffered from hypertension.