(poems, 1890)
At nineteen, Emily Dickinson was a cheerful and optimistic young woman and an active participant in the polite, sometimes uptight, New England community in which she had been raised. She attended local dinners and dances, and traveled with her congressman father on trips to Philadelphia, Washington, Boston, and New York. But by the time of her death, this once rather conventional young lady had become an almost mythical recluse who dressed almost exclusively in white, rarely left her second-story bedroom, and spent much of her time at her desk, writing poetry and letters to friends.
What had caused the dramatic shift in her life? Some suggest that a devastating disappointment in a relationship drove her inward. Others postulate that she may have suffered from a psychological malady such as agoraphobia. Or perhaps she just discovered that the place where she really found joy was in the confines of her own creative mind and soul. We’ll likely never know for certain, for though her poems and letters might provide hints, they generally obscure as much as they reveal about this wonderful but puzzling poet.
Dickinson embraced her seclusion, finding in her solitude a place where she could be spiritually transported. How she saw the world and what she experienced in her inner life provided the subject matter for her poems. She was extremely prolific during her short life, penning over 1,700 poems and writing enough letters to fill three stout volumes. These letters and poems reveal the woman she had become: a careful observer of the world and of her own self, someone cynical about easy answers to life’s hard questions, a wrestler with God, and a poet who found her own entirely unique way of communicating about life and death, time and eternity, faith and doubt, the simple beauties she saw in nature, and the exquisite sufferings she felt within her innermost self.
In her poems she uses language and grammar with a startling freshness, her word choices often unexpected and layered with levels of meaning. Dickinson constantly surprises with her insights, her observations, and her honesty. It is her inquisitive nature and her highly observant eye that give wings to her words, causing them to soar with such simplicity and ease. We see her watchful eye at work in poems such as “A bird comes down the walk” and “There’s a certain slant of slight,” and we see her playful images and metaphors in poems such as “Hope is the thing with feathers” and “Bring me the sunset in a cup.” These poems are crisply and tightly structured, without the waste of extra words, and therefore are usually quite short, which aids their memorability. Underlying her poetic vision is a childlike joy joined with a deep compassion:
If I can stop one Heart from breaking
I shall not live in vain
If I can ease one Life the Aching
Or cool one Pain
Or help one fainting Robin
Unto his Nest again
I shall not live in Vain.1
Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1830, Emily Dickinson lived a life that was outwardly uneventful. She died in the same home in which she had been born. She was well educated, attending Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, where she found herself resistant to the wave of revivalism and religious fervor that was sweeping through the vicinity, even though it had an impact on her family and friends. Letters written during this period of her life show her drawn toward a dramatic conversion like the others were experiencing but feeling a great caution about being swept into an emotional decision. So while all around her were embracing a Calvinist creed, she held back. And she would hold back throughout her life. Though she attended church with her family for many years, she eventually ceased going at all. But then again, by that time she was rarely leaving the environs of her home for any reason whatsoever.
She kept up most of her relationships via the mail, and one of her frequent correspondents was Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the editor of Atlantic Monthly, to whom she sent a handful of her poems. He was not initially an enthusiastic supporter, as her poems were unlike anything else being produced at the time, though some ten poems eventually did make their way into publication.
Upon her death, the extent of Dickinson’s literary production became clear. Her sister found sixty little books (sewn together by Emily herself) tied together with twine and tucked away in a box. These little books contained the poems that constituted her life’s work. Higginson and another editor eventually published the poems posthumously, but not before tidying up the grammatical “mistakes” that we now treasure as a characteristic of Dickinson’s style—the abrupt rhythms, the unconventional punctuation, the unexpected word choices, and the frequent use of dashes for dramatic pauses. These “corrected” versions still circulate widely in the public domain. It was not until 1955 that a complete version of all her poems was issued by Thomas Johnson that allowed her uniqueness to finally be given voice. To fully appreciate Emily Dickinson, one needs to read her poems as they were originally conceived.
While Dickinson never really felt at ease with the religion of her family and friends, her poetry reveals her to be very much concerned with her questions about God and eternity. She had to find her own path, though; her own way to “tell all the Truth, but tell it slant.”2 She was forever puzzling over life’s mysteries, asking hard questions, distrusting easy answers, and interrogating herself about her own motives. She could not accept all the tenets of the religion in which she had been raised, nor could she settle for a materialistic philosophy that failed to understand the mysteries she sensed just below the surface of things.
Her poems are a record of her unsettledness and her constant wrestling with God. Sometimes they seem full of faith and assurance. At other times—and sometimes even in the very same poem—they are skeptical, defiant, irreverent, or angry about the injustice of things. There are poems of doubt, and poems of doubt about doubt. Reading her poetry is like eavesdropping on her whispered conversations and angry arguments with God. As she wrote in a letter, “I am one of the lingering bad ones, and so do I slink away, and pause, and ponder, and ponder, and pause, and do work without knowing why—not surely for this brief world, and more sure it is not for heaven—and I ask what this message of Christ means.”3 In the depths of times of loneliness we hear the expression of her ache for intimacy with him:
Savior! I’ve no one else to tell—
And so I trouble thee. . . .
I brought thee the imperial Heart
I had not strength to hold—
The Heart I carried in my own—
Till mine too heavy grew—
Yet—strangest—heavier since it went—
Is it too large for you?4
Dickinson was a pilgrim who perhaps never quite arrived but was always faithful to the truth as she found it along the path of her journey. She knew that the end of that journey for all of us is death, and so questions about mortality, immortality, and eternity haunt many of her poems. Trying to comprehend and make sense of the death of beloved friends and family members was often the instigation of her musings. She seems to be asking, What is one to make of life in view of the imminence of death? “Behind Me—dips Eternity / Before Me—Immortality / Myself—the Term between.” The window of her upstairs bedroom overlooked the cemetery, which perhaps kept such matters ever in her sight, and death was never far from her mind: “The Only News I Know / Is bulletins all day / From Immortality.” Though Dickinson was a constant questioner, the reality of a life after death seems to be one of the things about which she expressed a great confidence and hope. In a poem about dying she enthused, “Goodbye to the Life I used to live— / and the World I used to know— / And kiss the Hills, for me, just once— / Then—I am ready to go!”5
In puzzling out her questions about God, Dickinson was not interested in the received answers of doctrine and dogma. She felt uncomfortable around those who thought they had everything figured out, and preferred to commune with God in a garden rather than a church service. In one poem she described her ideal worship experience: “It was a short procession, / The Bobolink was there— / An aged Bee addressed us— / And then we knelt in prayer.”6 Dickinson gave her full and loving gaze of attention to the world around her, embracing it in all its wonder and interrogating it for answers about ultimate things. Her love for God was expressed best through her love for the world he created—a world imperfect, but glorious. “This is my letter to the world / That never wrote to me,— / The simple news that Nature told, / With tender majesty.”7 Emily Dickinson was not waiting for heaven to experience God’s presence but looking to find it every day:
Some keep the Sabbath going to church;
I keep it by staying at home,
With a bobolink for a chorister,
And an orchard for a dome.
Some keep the Sabbath in surplice;
I just wear my wings,
And instead of tolling the bell for church,
Our little sexton sings.
God preaches,—a noted clergyman—,
And the sermon is never long;
So instead of getting to heaven at last,
I’m going all along!8
Few of Emily Dickinson’s contemporaries even took note of this quiet, reclusive woman who found her joys in the things that surrounded her in her small, self-enclosed world. “They shut me up in prose,” she wrote; but she sprang free. Today her song still rings out to those who find something of a fellow traveler in the poet who never felt fully at home in this world but tried to embrace it with all her heart and offered up all her doubts along with her deep sense of awe. As she famously teased, “I’m Nobody! Who are you? / Are you nobody, too? / Then there is a pair of us—don’t tell / They’ll banish us, you know.”9 And so this most reclusive of poets invited us into her most private places—her own heart, mind, and soul.