The Battle fought between the Soul
And No Man — is the One
Of all the Battles prevalent —
By far the Greater One — [#629]
Sorrow seems more general than it did, and not the estate of a few persons, since the war began; and if the anguish of others helped one with one’s own, now would be many medicines.
In these wrenching years, Emily Dickinson’s “grand theater of the mind” played out its acts against the colossal backdrop of the Civil War. In the period when Dickinson was experiencing an unspecified “terror” of disappointment and “a woe that made me tremble,” and while she was forging hundreds of poems in the “white heat” of anguish, the war was searing the nation’s consciousness and devouring its sons. On occasion, the shock of battle registered itself upon Dickinson in her Amherst seclusion, but the war was not her most pressing concern at the time. When she did refer to the conflict, it was often for the purpose of using it as a metaphor for a more primary grief. The cataclysmic war between the states, that is, gave her fresh images to describe “The Battle fought between the Soul/And No Man —.”
At the start of 1861, the prospect of war excited Amherst, as it did every city and village across the North and South. On the day after the firing on Fort Sumter, President Abraham Lincoln issued an emergency call for 75,000 troops to join the battle against rebel “combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings.” The country responded to the President’s call with fervor. “The heather is on fire. I never knew what a popular excitement can be,” wrote George Ticknor, a Harvard professor. “The whole population, men, women, and children, seem to be in the streets with Union favors and flags.”
In Amherst, the students and faculty of the college, as well as the citizens of the village, greeted with delight the prospect of a quick and holy war. Less than a week after Sumter, William Tyler, a professor of ancient languages, preached what his son described as “a rousing sermon in the college chapel at Amherst, ‘On themes suited to the circumstances, and in a strain intended to inspire courage, heroism, and self-sacrificing devotion.’” Inspired by the service, chemistry professor William Clark told the students that he would go form a company of one hundred recruits, if that many students would enlist along with him. “In less than half an hour,” Mason Tyler reported, “one hundred of the college students had given their names.”
Charles Hitchcock, son of the former president of Amherst, wrote about the war frenzy to his brother Edward, who was in London: “I never knew Amherst to be so much excited as it is now by the war news. I went up street last night, and found it difficult to work my way along from Cutler’s store to Phoenix Row on account of the crowd collected together by the excitement.” Hitchcock questioned the ardor for battle and singled out for scorn Professor Clark, who had been “so foolish as to set all College by the ears — so that the College is pretty nearly broken up. It is positively wrong I think to stir up students so much.”
Always eager to be at the center of civic affairs, Edward Dickinson quickly caught the martial spirit. On the Monday morning after Sumter fell, he and others hoisted “an elegant national banner” in honor of the Union effort and held an impromptu service filled with worship and war cries. The Springfield Republican reported that the ceremony included “addresses by President Stearns, Edward Dickinson, . . . and others,” after which there was plenty of “music, of the kind our revolutionary ancestors loved.” A week later, Edward Dickinson moved at a town meeting that the “selectmen be authorized to borrow $5000 to provide uniforms and care for the families of any needy volunteers.” After several years of political uncertainty following the Whig collapse in the 1854 election, Emily’s father was happy to be back in his rightful place, leading the public in a noble cause.
His daughter Emily, however, was slow to respond to this flurry of activity and never warmed to the subject of the war, except when it claimed someone she knew or loved. Having neither husband nor son at risk in the conflict, and with her father too old for battle and her brother too frightened to enlist, Emily had nothing immediately at stake in the conflict. Only when someone she knew came into danger did she appear distraught about the carnage that littered the landscape of the nation. For instance, when the health of Samuel Bowles was jeopardized by his tireless efforts to support the Union cause, Dickinson was mobilized to action, sending him poems and letters of sympathy to comfort his weary spirit. In like manner, she grew alarmed at the thought of losing her newly acquired “Preceptor” when Higginson went into battle in South Carolina. And when war struck down one of Amherst’s own sons on a distant battlefield, Dickinson felt the loss keenly.
In a December 1861 letter, Dickinson reported to her cousin Louise Norcross that the recently widowed Mrs. Edward Adams “had news of the death of her boy to-day, from a wound at Annapolis. Telegram signed by Frazer Stearns. You remember him. Another one died in October — from fever caught in the camp. . . . ‘Dead! Both her boys’!” The Frazer Stearns to whom she referred was the son of Mary and William Augustus Stearns, the President of Amherst College from 1854 to 1876. In concluding her letter to her cousin, Dickinson wrote, “Christ be merciful! Frazer Stearns is just leaving Annapolis. His father has gone to see him to-day. I hope that ruddy face won’t be brought home frozen.”
At first, the citizens of Amherst, like almost everyone else in the North, thought the war would end quickly and never considered the possibility of stalemate and massive casualties. Each minor skirmish seemed like a prelude to the impending grand finale of the war. On February 20, 1862, for instance, the Springfield Republican reported the events of “an exciting day for Amherst” when the “news of the capture of Fort Donelson reached town about 1 o’clock p.m.” To commemorate the victory, “the bells were rung, and more tin horns brought into requisition by the students, than the priests blew around the walls of Jericho. The stars and stripes were unfurled from the tower of the chapel, and cheer on cheer rose from College hill.” The revelry continued a few days later, albeit in a more formal setting, when the students of the college and the residents of the town crowded into the college chapel for a series of “very interesting exercises.” Several Amherst faculty members spoke, as did “President Stearns, who is just getting out after a long illness contracted on a visit to [his son Frazer at] the army camps at Annapolis.”
While Dickinson was unmoved by such celebrations, she shared the sorrow of the town two weeks later, when news of Frazer Stearns’s death reached Amherst. “Dear Children,” Emily wrote her cousins, “’tis least that I can do, to tell you of brave Frazer — ‘killed at Newbern,’ darlings. His big heart shot away by a ‘minie ball.’ I had read of those — I didn’t think that Frazer would carry one to Eden with him.” He “fell by the side of Professor Clark, his superior officer —,” the Amherst professor who had recruited him. Frazer “lived ten minutes in a soldier’s arms, asked twice for water — murmured just, ‘My God!’ and passed!” After a year, the war had come home to Dickinson at last.
When Frazer’s body was returned to Amherst for burial, Dickinson reported that “nobody here could look on Frazer — not even his father. The doctors would not allow it.” At his funeral, “crowds came to tell him good-night, choirs sang to him, pastors told how brave he was — early-soldier heart. And the family bowed their heads, as the reeds the wind shakes.” Faced with the fury of war, Emily could only conclude her letter to her cousins with the plea, “Let us love better, children, it’s most that’s left to do.”
Frazer’s death shook all who knew him. From New York, Samuel Bowles wrote to Austin and Sue that “the news from Newbern took away all the remaining life. I shut & threw away the paper after seeing at first glance the great sad fact to all of us who knew him. I did not care for victories — for anything then.” Within the week, Emily wrote to Bowles that “Austin is chilled — by Frazer’s murder — He says — his Brain keeps saying over ‘Frazer is killed’ — ‘Frazer is killed,’ just as Father told it — to Him. Two or three words of lead — that dropped so deep, they keep weighing — .” Her plea to Bowles was more for her own sake than for Austin’s: “Tell Austin — how to get over them!” She had offered Bowles generous words of comfort in recent months; what could he now say to her to get over these “three words of lead”?
As the war ground on, Dickinson increasingly personalized it, thinking of the needs it created as well as the dangers it presented. When Bowles traveled to Europe for rest in the spring and summer of 1862, she sorely missed his inspiring energy and reassuring presence. When he returned in the fall, Dickinson told him that she thought that “friends are nations in themselves — to supersede the Earth —.” In his absence, news of the war had been harder to take: “Few absences could seem so wide as your’s has done, to us —. . . . We used to tell each other, when you were from America — how failure in a Battle — were easier — and you here —.”
Two years into the war, in February 1863, Dickinson found new cause for concern when Higginson was dispatched to South Carolina at the head of a regiment of black soldiers. Having not yet met her “Preceptor” in person, she wrote to him, “I should have liked to see you, before you became improbable. War feels to me an oblique place —.” The war felt oblique, that is, until it threatened to rob her of what she loved or needed. “I trust you may pass the limit of War, and though not reared to prayer — when service is had in Church, for Our Arms, I include myself.” One can only wonder what Higginson thought of the closing request that came to him from the shelter of Amherst, as he ventured out to battle: “Could you, with honor, avoid Death, I entreat you — Sir — It would bereave Your Gnome —.”
Earlier in the same letter, Dickinson had told Higginson that “Perhaps Death — gave me awe for friends — striking sharp and early, for I held them since — in a brittle love — of more alarm, than peace.” Death had already taught her much about the contingency of life and the arbitrariness of God. For Dickinson’s contemporary, Henry Adams, the message of both science and human suffering was that God was but another name for the impersonal forces that governed the world. As he watched his sister die an agonizing death in 1870, Adams concluded, “God might be, as the Church said, a Substance, but he could not be a Person.” For Dickinson God was never to become just a force but remained very much a person, one against whose wiles, jealousy, and cruelty she had to protect herself and those she loved. One of her very last poems called frost “The blonde Assassin” who beheaded flowers to the delight of “an Approving God” [#1668]. Lodged in security far from the field of battle, she feared the random power the war embodied. Powerless to protect those she loved from the cruel and cunning force of war, she could only entreat the likes of Higginson to seek to “avoid Death” with appropriate honor.
Eventually, however, Dickinson came to think of the stalemate and slaughter in more general, and less personal, terms. In an unprecedented decision, she consented early in 1864 to allow three of her poems to be published in a paper whose purpose was to raise money for the Union war effort. She had been approached with similar requests earlier but had refused. Now the endless suffering prompted this small sacrifice from her. “Sorrow seems more general than it did, and not the estate of a few persons, since the war began,” she wrote to her cousins in 1864, “and if the anguish of others helped one with one’s own, now would be many medicines.” If publishing a few of her poems could comfort wounded souls and aid wounded soldiers, then so be it, this private poet concluded at a time of dire public need.
“EYES BE BLIND, HEART BE STILL”
As the war raged on the battlefields several hundred miles to the south, life in the Dickinson home went on as usual. With Edward Dickinson well beyond the age of military service and Austin having paid $500 to provide a substitute for his draft call, the family was not directly at risk in the conflict. Freed from the burdens of military commitment, both Austin and Edward practiced law and tended to the affairs of college and town during the war years. At the Evergreens in 1861, Sue gave birth to a son, Edward (“Ned”), the first grandchild in the family, and across the yard at the Homestead, Mrs. Dickinson, Vinnie, and Emily cared for the daily management of the household.
At the start of the war, Emily was thirty years old and had begun to settle into household patterns that would vary little for the rest of her life. On many days the Dickinson family breakfasted together and held devotional exercises led by Edward. “They are religious — except me —” Emily wrote Higginson about her family in 1862, “and address an Eclipse, every morning — whom they call their ‘Father.’” After the morning gathering, the members of the family went their separate ways. The volume of correspondence and poetry that Emily produced in the early 1860s would indicate that she must have spent a great number of hours writing in the solitude of her second-floor room. By her own account, her family showed little interest in the life of the mind as she was living it: “My Mother does not care for thought — and Father, too busy with his Briefs — to notice what we do —.” Though they lived under the same roof, the Dickinsons were in many ways strangers to each other. Years later, after his first visit to the Homestead, Higginson described the Dickinson home as “a house where each member runs his or her own selves.”
The Dickinson household in these years was of a type perceptively described by Samuel Ward when he read an early edition of Emily’s poems. Ward had been a New England transcendentalist but abandoned that faith to become a New York investment banker. When he read Dickinson’s poems in 1891, he wrote immediately to Higginson: “She [Emily] is the quintessence of that element we all have who are of Puritan descent. . . . We came to this country to think our own thoughts with nobody to hinder.” In analyzing the New England temperament, Ward deftly outlined the poet’s particular character and the shape of the Dickinsons’ family life. “We conversed with our own souls till we lost the art of communicating with other people. The typical family grew up strangers to each other, as in this case. It was awfully high, but awfully lonesome. Such prodigies of shyness do not exist elsewhere.” Occasionally, Ward explained, the taciturn New England temperament became inexplicably loquacious. “If the gift of articulateness was not denied, you had Channing, Emerson, Hawthorne a stupendous example, & so many others. Mostly it was denied, & became a family fate. This is where Emily Dickinson comes in. She was the articulate inarticulate.”
When not trying to articulate the inarticulate in her poetry during these years, Emily might be found gardening or baking. She had a conservatory in the Homestead, and her letters often enclosed a single pressed petal or might even be accompanied by an entire arrangement of flowers she had grown. Emily spent a good deal of time working the gardens on the family property and no doubt made use in her baking of some of the things she grew there. In 1856, she had placed second in the baking contest for “Rye and Indian Bread” at the Amherst Cattle Show, winning a 75¢ prize and a place on the panel of judges for the following year’s competition. When she met Higginson in 1870, one of the first things she told him was that “she makes all the bread for her father only likes hers & says ‘& people must have puddings’ this very dreamily, as if they were comets — so she makes them.” Several friends and family members thought so much of Emily’s gingerbread that they asked for, and received, copies of her recipe:
1 Quart Flour,
Cup Butter,
Cup Cream,
1 Table Spoon Ginger,
1 Tea Spoon Soda,
1 Salt
Make up with Molasses —
Dickinson stole what time she could from her household responsibilities to read the fiction, poetry, and popular journalism of her day. Even in her seclusion, the world poured in at her door, the widespread circulation of books and periodicals having made her withdrawal from society much different than it would have been even fifty years earlier. In the early 1860s, the Dickinson family subscribed to fifteen magazines and newspapers, far more than most families in Amherst received. In addition to The Springfield Republican, they read three other newspapers; their magazines ranged from the New England Farmer to the church publication, Home Missionary, the railroading magazine, American Engineer Monthly, and the popular literary magazine, Harper’s Magazine. “If Emily Dickinson gradually withdrew from the world,” argues Daniel Lombardo, “the world, at least in the form of an unusual number of magazines and newspapers, arrived for the Dickinsons at Box 207, Amherst.”
Emily’s constant companion in this period was her “dear, faithful friend Carlo,” a Newfoundland her father had given her in the early 1850s. Edward Dickinson thought that a dog might help his daughter overcome her fear of public outings, and for almost a decade Carlo accompanied Emily on her forays around Amherst. She referred to him no less than fifteen times in her correspondence, and even people who had never met her were made aware of Carlo’s importance in her life. This was the case when her “Preceptor” Higginson received a brief note from her after a long silence: “Carlo died — E. Dickinson Would you instruct me now?”
When Carlo died in late January of 1866, Dickinson was still recuperating from a mysterious disorder of her eyes. This affliction may not have been serious in itself, but she and her doctor treated it as if it were. In the final years of the Civil War, Dickinson was frightened by the possibility of losing her sight or, at least, of having it seriously impaired. For her, such a loss would also have entailed the loss of poetry, both the reading and the writing of it, and that was a prospect that she could not bear.
We lack a definitive record of the condition from which Dickinson suffered in the mid-1860s, but the most likely diagnosis at a distance has been put forward by Norbert Hirschhorn and Polly Longsworth. From a careful study of the textual evidence and relevant medical records, they conclude she suffered from anterior uveitis. This painful condition involves an inflammation of the middle layer of the eye, which includes the iris. The swelling causes redness of the eye and is accompanied by a deep aching pain, sensations of tearing, and a heightened sensitivity to light. Dickinson was likely referring to these symptoms, when she wrote to Louise Norcross in early 1865: “The eyes are as with you, sometimes sad. I think they are not worse, nor do I think them better than when I came home,” she reported. In the brightness of January, “the snow-light offends them, and the house is bright; notwithstanding, they hope some.” That hope would dim occasionally, however, especially when Vinnie would wonder aloud “‘why I don’t get well.’ This makes me think I am long sick, and this takes the ache to my eyes.”
To be rid of this “ache,” Dickinson twice traveled to Boston, in 1864 and 1865, to be cared for by the renowned ophthalmologist Dr. Henry Willard Williams. Perhaps overreacting to his patient’s disorder, Williams ordered Emily to stay in Boston far longer than she had planned. Further, he ordered her neither to read nor write while she was under his care. “He is not willing I should write,” Emily wrote home to Vinnie in a brief note in May of 1864. She had to stay in Boston for seven months, and for a woman who was not accustomed to be away from home more than a few hours at a time, the separation was unendurable. In November, she apologized to Vinnie: “Emily may not be able as she was, but all she can, she will.” Even the plants she left behind in the conservatory “are Foreigners, now, and all, a Foreigner.”
Dickinson would look back upon this time as a period of tedium and terror. She later confided to Joseph Lyman about “a woe, the only one that ever made me tremble. It was a shutting out of all the dearest ones of time, the strongest friends of the soul — BOOKS.” Dr. Williams had snatched them from her grasp with his prohibition and banished her to a chilly, thoughtless exile. “The medical man said avaunt ye tormentors, he also said ‘down, thoughts, & plunge into her soul.’ He might as well have said, ‘Eyes be blind’, ‘heart be still’. So I had eight months of Siberia.”
From her “Siberian” boardinghouse in Cambridge, Emily wrote brief notes filled with images of imprisonment and expressions of remorse. In a letter to Vinnie in July, she called herself “Elijah . . . in the Wilderness.” Even though “the Doctor [is] enthusiastic about my getting well — I feel no gayness yet. I suppose I had been discouraged so long.” She felt like “the Prisoner of Chillon” who “did not know Liberty when it came, and asked to go back to Jail,” she told her sister. In November, only weeks before the end of her seven-month stay, she wrote home to Vinnie that “I have been sick so long I do not know the Sun.” To her entire family, she gave thanks “for caring about me when I do no good. I will work with all my might, always, as soon as I get well —.”
Dickinson did “get well,” as the crisis ran its course after the second round of “treatments” in the following year. But memories of the trauma remained fixed in her mind for many years. Her doctor’s reaction and restrictions had triggered deep anxieties, because, for her, to lose sight would be to lose all. When Dr. Williams finally allowed her to read again, she wrote, “going home[,] I flew to the shelves and devoured the luscious passages [of Shakespeare]. I thought I should tear the leaves out as I turned them.”
When Emily returned from “Siberia” after seven months away, it was Vinnie who met her at the station in nearby Palmer, just as it had been Vinnie who had done Emily’s share of the family chores in her absence. “I shall go Home in two weeks. You will get me at Palmer, yourself. Let no one beside come,” Emily demanded. Vinnie obliged.
As she and Emily aged together, Vinnie assumed an ever larger role in the family, caring for her invalid mother and sheltering her reclusive sister from the world. Like countless educated women in the late nineteenth century, Vinnie faced the problem of vocation, as finance capitalism and the Industrial Revolution did away with the domestic economy that had dominated colonial and early national life. With the middle-class home transformed into a center of consumption by the mid-nineteenth century, the home became the “women’s sphere,” but what was a woman to do in it? If, as Vinnie said late in life, “Austin had Amherst” and “father believed,” what were the women to do?
In assuming her role as a poet with “title divine,” Emily found her vocation and made her home, at least for herself, a center of production in a unique, new form of domestic economy. Mrs. Dickinson took upon herself the work of love, ailment, and complaint. That left Vinnie with the job of looking after all of them. (“I had the family to keep track of.”) With a warrior’s passion and, on occasion, a warrior’s recklessness, she plunged into the task of protecting her family, and particularly Emily, against all enemies real and imagined. She was devoted to this sister whose needs she could gauge with precision but whose genius she never fully understood. Millicent Todd Bingham, who came to know Vinnie in the last years of her life, notes that at all times “Vinnie was there . . . to ward off intruders and in general to take the brunt. Thus shielded, Emily could withdraw without explanation.”
Emily’s younger sister was witty and belligerent. Over the years, she became well known to Amherst residents for her caustic tongue and her readiness to defend the interests of the Dickinsons at any cost. A professor who had known her well wrote of Vinnie at her death that “she abhorred the commonplace in speech almost more than the vulgar.” Her views of life, he said, “were at once shrewd and amusing to a remarkable degree.” Vinnie could do battle over any number of subjects, but according to Bingham “her fiercest denunciations were reserved for those who ventured to oppose or even call in question, the opinions of her father and brother on matters of public concern.”
Emily treasured Vinnie’s sheltering care. She was often amused, and occasionally annoyed, by her pugnacious sister, but she also could not imagine life without Vinnie at her side. In 1859, Emily wrote to the Hollands, “Vinnie is sick to-night, which gives the world a russet tinge, usually so red. It is only a headache, but when the head aches next to you, it becomes important. When she is well, time leaps. When she is ill, he lags, or stops entirely. Sisters are brittle things. God was penurious with me, which makes me shrewd with Him.” In almost all important respects, after Austin married Sue in 1856 these two sisters were each other’s family. No one knew Emily more intimately than did Vinnie, and no one did more to protect her from all unwanted intrusions upon her time and person. In 1873, when the Dickinson parents were still very much alive, Emily wrote again to the Hollands. “She has no Father and Mother but me and I have no Parents but her,” she told them. Considering the essential role Emily’s younger sister had come to play in her life, there was scant exaggeration in the claim.
IN THE WAKE OF WAR
Just as the start of the Civil War had marked for Dickinson a period of extraordinary productivity and mysterious perplexity, so did its close signal a definitive turn in her life. Her final trip to Boston for eye treatments in 1865 proved to be the last journey she ever took away from Amherst. Several years before that, she had already stopped attending church. Not long after she returned from Boston, she stopped making any trips at all off the grounds of “my Father’s House.” Her relationship to Austin, Sue, and their children remained strong, but even her walks across the lawn to “the other house” ended.
Emily’s immediate family may not have worried about the isolation she chose at this point in her life, but a number of those who knew her did feel concern. Higginson, in particular, wondered about his friend’s seclusion. He could not fathom her reluctance to venture out into a world that he had spent his life — as an abolitionist, pastor, soldier, and man of letters — trying to salvage and reform. When they first met in 1870, Dickinson attempted to explain her solitude by telling him, “I find ecstasy in living — the mere sense of living is joy enough.” It was when Higginson pressed the point that she told him bluntly of her desire to stay rooted in one place: “I asked if she never felt want of employment, never going off the place & never seeing any visitor. ‘I never thought of conceiving that I could ever have the slightest approach to such a want in all future time.’”
To be certain, during the last twenty years of her life Dickinson dreamed of things she had never known — travel to foreign lands, the mysteries of marriage, and the exhilaration of renown — but she never expressed regrets about what she lacked or had failed to do. At times, she felt pinched by the provincial, prosaic life of her family and by the toil of household duties, but at no time did she desire to be free of family or home. More than a century later, we may read Dickinson’s experience as a story of relentless frustration and oppression, but she did not see it that way. The woman who claimed never to have thought of having “‘the slightest approach to such a want’” would have been puzzled by the claim of a contemporary critic that “the forces that [Dickinson] felt conspired against her ‘real life,’ her private life of writing” were “her household responsibilities, the demands of her parents, the condescension of her brother Austin, and the prescriptions of her Calvinist religion.”
Knowing full well the constraints of life at the Homestead, Dickinson chose them as her own. Ordinary life attracted her, in part, because it promised so little that it could not easily disappoint her. Marriage, renown, and conversion, on the other hand, promised many things but delivered few. As a young woman, Dickinson had defended her decision not to attend a revival meeting at Mount Holyoke by explaining, “I felt that I was so easily excited that I might again be deceived and I dared not trust myself.” There was little in the Homestead that could deceive or surprise her.
Even Dickinson’s earliest poems speak of the shocks of deception and disappointment, and the subject grew in importance throughout her adulthood. A verse from 1859, for instance, reads “the days when Birds come back —” as signs of God’s trickery, as he employs nature to fool us with the beauty of “the days when skies resume/The old — old sophistries of June —” [#122]. Within a few years, the imagery of disappointment became more searing and terrifying in her poems. Lyrics dating from the time of the Civil War tell of the “Soul at the ‘White Heat,’” of a “Morning after Wo,” and of “the Soul/That gets a Staggering Blow —” [#401, #398, #683]. The spectral human beings who float through these poems may be haunted by “a Funeral, in my Brain,” cornered by a terror “so appalling — it exhilarates —” or startled by a “Horror not to be surveyed —/But skirted in the Dark —” [#340, #341, #877].
Several poems from these years tell stories about the cycle of expectation, devastation, and stunned survival:
The Soul has Bandaged moments —
When too appalled to stir —
She feels some ghastly Fright come up
And stop to look at her —
Salute her, with long fingers —
Caress her freezing hair —
Sip, Goblin, from the very lips
The Lover — hovered — o’er —
Unworthy, that a thought so mean
Accost a Theme — so — fair —
The soul has moments of escape —
When bursting all the doors —
She dances like a Bomb, abroad,
And swings opon the Hours,
As do the Bee — delirious borne —
Long Dungeoned from his Rose —
Touch Liberty — then know no more,
But Noon, and Paradise —
The Soul’s retaken moments —
When, Felon led along,
With shackles on the plumed feet,
And staples, in the song,
The Horror welcomes her, again,
These, are not brayed of Tongue — [#360]
In part, Dickinson stayed at home for the last two decades of her life to avoid the “Horror” of the “Soul’s retaken moments,” with “shackles” on its feet and with “staples, in the song.” Safely ensconced within her “Father’s House,” she knew what to expect of others and what could be demanded of her by them. Under that roof, she could shield herself from the claims of others by deferring to the commands of her “preceptors,” the authority of her father, and the needs of her family. When Higginson invited Dickinson to Boston in 1866, for instance, she refused him and blamed her father: “I am uncertain of Boston. I had promised to visit my Physician for a few days in May, but Father objects because he is in the habit of me. Is it more far to Amherst?” Similarly, within a few years she would be invoking Higginson’s name to ward off those who wanted her to publish her work.
Well versed in the role assigned to her in the Dickinson family, Emily found herself freed by her duties to script and act in the drama staged in “the grand theater of her mind.” While committed to the particular needs of her family, she was at the same time free to develop a private world of imaginative alternatives. The very constraints of her daily reality, in other words, made possible the wide latitude of her poetic endeavors.
But what if the reason for Dickinson’s seclusion, at least in part, proved to be somehow less sensible and more unsettling? Might it not be that in addition to the generous — and plausible — readings that her family gave of her retreat, there were other disturbing forces at work in her decision, which perhaps contributed to her reclusive inclinations without necessarily determining them? Where the early twentieth century saw a fascination with a doomed love affair as the reason behind Dickinson’s retreat, some recent scholarship has shifted to theories of psychological disorder to explain her seclusion.
It does appear that Emily Dickinson suffered from some form of agoraphobia, the fear of open spaces and public places. That fear involves something more than a reluctance to be seen by others; it includes an element of dread, a terror at the prospect of plunging into vast expanses. Any number of Dickinson’s poems employ images of trackless immensities and uncharted paths. While searching for God, one poem can discover nothing but “Vast Prairies of Air” [#525]; another poem asserts that the way to God has been lost, because “God’s Right Hand —” has been amputated, “And God cannot be found —” [#1581]; and in one of her most perfect poems, the dead must await their resurrection for seemingly endless ages, as the constellations make their way across the empty heavens with sickening slowness:
Safe in their Alabaster Chambers,
Untouched by Morning —
And untouched by noon —
Lie the meek members of the Resurrection —
Rafter of satin — and Roof of stone —
Grand go the Years — in the Crescent — above them —
Worlds scoop their Arcs —
And Firmaments — row —
Diadems — drop — and Doges — surrender —
Soundless as dots — on a Disc of Snow — [#124C]
This poem Emily wrote and revised, after having received Sue’s criticism, in 1861. Its picture of the universe is nicely explained by a description C. S. Lewis once offered of the difference between a medieval model of the universe and a modern one. “The medieval universe,” he wrote, “while unimaginably large, was also unambiguously finite, . . . containing within itself an ordered variety.” Things were to prove very different with the modern picture of the universe: “To look out on the night sky with modern eyes is like looking out over a sea that fades away into mist, or looking about one in a trackless forest — trees forever and no horizon. . . . The ‘space’ of modern astronomy may arouse terror, or bewilderment or vague reverie; the spheres of the old present us with an object in which the mind can rest, overwhelming in its greatness but satisfying in its harmony.” For Lewis, “this explains why all sense of the pathless, the baffling, and the utterly alien — all agoraphobia — is so markedly absent from medieval poetry when it leads us . . . into the sky.”
Lewis’s observation is extraordinarily useful for an understanding of Dickinson, because it offers a way of setting her personal fear in a greater intellectual and cultural context. The universe had grown unimaginably more vast — especially in terms of time — in her lifetime, and the pattern of design had been shattered and scrambled. For Dickinson, the sense of disorientation in this new universe was palpable. Her apprehensions about the groundless disarray all around her may well have influenced her choice of the Homestead’s charted limits over the wilderness outside its gates. There were benefits, after all, to boundaries:
A Prison gets to be a friend —
Between it’s Ponderous face
And Our’s — a Kinsmanship express —
And in it’s narrow Eyes —
We come to look with gratitude
For the appointed Beam
It deal us — stated as Our food —
And hungered for — the same —
We learn to know the Planks —
That answer to Our feet —
So miserable a sound — at first —
Nor even now — so sweet —
As plashing in the Pools —
When Memory was a Boy —
But a Demurer Circuit —
A Geometric Joy —
The Posture of the Key
That interrupt the Day
To Our Endeavor — Not so real
The Cheek of Liberty —
As this Phantasm steel —
Whose features — Day and Night —
Are present to us — as Our Own —
And as escapeless — quite —
The narrow Round — the stint —
The slow exchange of Hope —
For something passiver — Content
Too steep for looking up —
The Liberty we knew
Avoided — like a Dream —
Too wide for any night but Heaven —
If That — indeed — redeem — [#456]
This poem shows that Dickinson would have understood the point at the heart of “The Supper at Elsinore,” a short story by the Danish writer Isak Dinesen. Set in the early nineteenth century, Dinesen’s story is about two sisters and a brother who lead lives of unbridled aestheticism, the brother as a marauding pirate and the sisters as fantasy-spinning spinsters. When the dead brother visits his sisters as a ghost, he tells them: “‘We have been amateurs in saying no, little sisters. But God can say no. Good God, how he can say no.’” Having gone through five wives and a series of sensational adventures, he now treasures the “‘thought of those great, pure, and beautiful things which say no to us. . . . Those who say yes, we get them under us, and we ruin them and leave them, and find when we have left them that they have made us sick. The earth says yes to our schemes and our work, but the sea says no; and we, we love the sea ever. And to hear God say no, in the stillness, in his own voice, that to us is very good.’”
The character in the Dinesen story is describing what Hans-Georg Gadamer has called that “insight into the limitations of humanity” that teaches us that human “experience is experience of finitude.” In the years of her explosive development and personal trial, Dickinson was learning much about the intimate connections between art and death. As the poet W. H. Auden observes, “aesthetic religion” of the kind championed by Dickinson produces “Tragic Drama” when it comprehends the full extent of good and evil and apprehends the “certainty that death comes to all men, . . . even for the exceptional individual.” Dickinson had learned to “close the Valves of her attention —/Like Stone —” [#409] and bar the door to all intruders, but of all those that knocked, death was the one she could not keep out. He was the “supple Suitor/That wins at Last —” and “All but Death, Can be adjusted” [#1470, #789]. “Because I could not stop for Death —” she ironically noted in a famous poem, “He kindly stopped for me —” [#479].
Yet even as death knocked at the door of the Homestead, Dickinson still loved to “dwell in Possibility — A fairer House than Prose —.” Here death and disappointment were banished, and poetry and possibility ruled:
I reckon — When I count at all —
First — Poets — Then the Sun —
Then Summer — Then the Heaven of God —
And then — the List is done —
But, looking back — the First so seems
To Comprehend the Whole —
The Others look a needless Show —
So I write — Poets — All —
Their Summer — lasts a solid Year —
They can afford a Sun
The East — would deem extravagant —
And if the Further Heaven —
Be Beautiful as they prepare
For Those who worship Them —
It is too difficult a Grace —
To justify the Dream — [#533]
The poet Richard Wilbur has a wonderful phrase for Dickinson’s approach to the stinginess of God that is hinted at in this and other of her poems. That parsimony drove her to become “the laureate and attorney of the empty-handed.” Yet, as Wilbur notes, Dickinson turned poverty into abundance through her view of metaphor and renunciation. Having learned her lessons well from the New Testament, the poet assumed that to “forego what we desire is somehow to gain.” Through language, she could own a summer that would “last a solid Year” and never fade to fall. As she put the matter in a letter written late in life: “Emblem is immeasurable — that is why it is better than Fulfillment, which can be drained —.” There is mercy, after all, in lack: “Remoteness is the founder of sweetness; could we see all we hope, or hear the whole we fear told tranquil, like another tale, there would be madness near.”
Emily Dickinson’s seclusion freed her to explore and endure the full range of her ambivalence about a number of weighty matters. For every poem of hers that questions the nature or existence of God, another affirms the goodness of the Divine character and power. For every lyric that celebrates the eternity of art, another sees poetry as merely one more mortal creation. Even within single poems, Dickinson engaged in what Sharon Cameron has called the act of “choosing not choosing.” Dickinson developed a habit of depositing throughout her manuscripts alternate words or phrases without an indication of a final choice. While many poets refused to choose between alternatives, Cameron argues that the “not choosing in Dickinson’s poems is different from not choosing” in other poetry of the Romantic tradition. Poets such as Whitman and Yeats avoided choice by using the conjunction “or” to mean “both this and that.” In Dickinson’s poetry matters are “different because it is assumed [in Dickinson’s] poetry that choice is required, even as the requirement is repeatedly, if subversively, transgressed.”
Ambivalence was more than a poetic strategy for Dickinson, for it went to the heart of her uncertainty about life. Like a number of her contemporaries in the late nineteenth century, she found herself caught between the dead assurances of the past and the dynamic uncertainties of the present. Not long before she died, she wrote in a letter that “on subjects of which we know nothing, or should I say Beings —. . . we both believe, and disbelieve a hundred times an Hour, which keeps Believing nimble.” In choosing not to choose and in shuttling “a hundred times an Hour” between belief and disbelief, between infinite possibilities and tragic realities, Dickinson embodied in her life the “polyphonic” quality that Mikhail Bakhtin says animates certain great modern literary texts. In a “polyphonic” novel as Bakhtin defines it, characters espousing diametrically opposed views engage each other and the reader in dialogue. While a certain character may represent the author’s point of view, no single character dominates discussion or determines the final meaning of the work. “Several consciousnesses meet as equals and engage in a dialogue that is in principle unfinalizable,” write Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson of Bakhtin’s view.
What Bakhtin saw in the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky and others, we can witness in the life and work of Emily Dickinson. Passionately committed to the particular village of Amherst, she nevertheless also roamed the regions of boundless possibilities. She kept her “Believing nimble” both by plumbing the depths of self-conscious doubt and by scaling the heights of spiritual assurance. She barred the door to the world, but death got in. She chose to be a “Bride” but “without the swoon” and a poet who sought everlasting fame but had no present audience to serve as her “tribunal.” Having “chosen not to choose” by the time she reached the age of thirty, Dickinson created the conditions that made possible one of the richest literary lives in the history of American culture. Yet at the same time, she consigned herself to a life of civil, internal strife, as she engaged in “the Battle fought between the Soul/And No Man.”