These Fevered Days

by Martha Ackmann

  * Mr. Cutler was Susan Gilbert’s brother-in-law—the man who believed women who worked ran the risk of becoming ill or dying. He was married to Susan’s sister, Harriet.

  † Edward Dickinson represented the Tenth District of Massachusetts from 1853 to 1855.

  ‡ Abraham Lincoln was a Whig until 1854, when he became a Republican. His shift represented the change many Whigs made to align themselves more closely with antislavery politics.

  § Coleman Hutchison writes that when Edward Dickinson was ousted from political office and returned to Amherst, his “self-imposed exile, of stubborn adherence to principle, of active withdrawal from publicity may seem all too familiar. . . . Edward Dickinson removed himself from politics at nearly exactly the same moment Emily Dickinson began writing poems with the rhetoric of privatism, withdrawal, and remove.” Hutchison argues that Dickinson sympathized with her father’s outsider status and the “rhetoric of defeat recurs with startling frequency” in her verse. [Coleman Hutchison “‘Eastern Exiles’: Dickinson, Whiggery, and War,” Emily Dickinson Journal 13, no. 2, 5, 6, and 13.]

  ¶ The number 50 is the number of poems Dickinson scholars propose she wrote by 1859. Few of Emily Dickinson’s poems are dated. Scholars estimate the dates of her verse by using handwriting analysis, examination of paper, and other means. I use Ralph Franklin’s The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Variorum Edition, as my source for dating poems, and note individual poems by their Franklin (F) number. Cristanne Miller’s 2016 Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them is another valuable resource. Miller presents approximately 1,100 poems that Dickinson copied in her own hand and retained among her papers.

  # Words in parenthesis indicate words that Dickinson inserted in the text as alternates.

  ** “Private public” is Dickinson biographer Richard Sewall’s apt phrase, describing the poet’s reading audience of friends and family. She had a “public” who read her poems, but they were a private readership selected and controlled by her. [Richard B. Sewall, The Life of Emily Dickinson (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974), 603.]

  Five

  TALLER FEET

  Saturday, March 1, 1862 9 p.m. Thermometer 23.2 Clouds stra. NW 2. Wind NW 3 Thermometer Attached to Barometer 39.0. Barometer 29,925. Dry Bulb 23.0. Wet Bulb 21.0. Force of Vapor .089. Humidity 72. Remarks: Near 3 ft of snow on the ground. Pleasant Drifts.

  —Ebenezer Snell, The Meteorological Journal kept at Amherst College

  The Civil War had been going on for nearly a year and had everyone in Amherst on edge. Mr. Merrick worried his tailor shop couldn’t keep up with the demand for new military coats. He needed more local girls to help with the sewing. Amherst College president William Augustus Stearns was distressed that his son, an adjutant lieutenant, might never return to his science studies. Frazar Stearns had enlisted with other classmates and now was headed south with the Burnside Expedition and Captain Clark, their commander and former chemistry professor.* The new minister in town, Rev. Henry Hubbell, had doubts about remaining at First Church. Parish ministry seemed the sanctuary of the timid, he thought. Shouldn’t he join other men and enlist? Judge Ithamar Conkey feared the Union couldn’t win. After troops lost the Battle of Bull Run, he mounted a box in the center of town and shouted, “You see it is all over. . . . We cannot whip the South!”1 Widow Adams cared nothing for soapboxes or military bombast. She lay awake at night and wondered if she could get out of bed in the morning. Weeks before, she had received word that her son Sylvester had died of wounds at Annapolis. Earlier another son, Charles, had died of typhoid in camp. The Snells were worried their grieving neighbor would never come out of her darkened bedchamber. “Dead! Both her boys!” Emily had written her cousins Fanny and Loo.2 For many residents of Amherst, daylight served as an impudent reminder that battles of every kind continued. As dazed as anyone, Emily found herself asking, “When did the war really begin?”3

  She knew, of course. How could she not? But for Emily, living in fateful times went back further than secession. It began with Aunt Lavinia’s death in 1860. “I can’t believe it, when your letters come, saying what Aunt Lavinia said ‘just before she died,’” she had written Vinnie. Emily’s sister had been in Boston staying with their ailing aunt, and tending to Uncle Loring, Fanny, and Loo. “Blessed Aunt Lavinia now,” Emily added. “So many broken-hearted people have got to hear the birds sing, and see all the little flowers grow, just the same as if the sun hadn’t stopped shining forever!”4 Emily could not imagine that in less than a year Uncle Loring would be dead, too, leaving her young cousins to fend for themselves. Then came Lincoln’s election that November. Amherst had no telegraph, and young men rode to Northampton to await word. When the sounder came alive after midnight and tapped out news of Lincoln’s victory, the men mounted their horses and raced back eight miles across farmers’ fields to alert the citizens of Amherst. They jostled awake the sexton at First Church and did the same at the college chapel. The sound of bells woke up everyone. Months later, when the dreadful news of Fort Sumter reached Amherst, Reverend Hubbell said the recruiting office set up in the streets.5 “Sorrow seems more general than it did, and not the estate of a few persons, since the war began,” Emily wrote. “If the anguish of others helped one with one’s own, now would be many medicines.”6

  Emily watched men and women doubled up on their daily work to assist with the war effort. Down in Springfield the armory speeded up its manufacturing of weapons. At Mount Holyoke, seminary students prepared boxes for soldiers. One shipment contained seventy-seven pairs of hose, seventeen pairs of mittens, thirty pairs of hospital slippers, reams of writing paper, and lint carefully collected for bandages. For the first time in its history, the Springfield Republican printed extra editions to meet reader demand. As soon as pages slid off the press, newspapermen tacked them to boards outside, and crowds elbowed their way to search the latest casualty lists. One Springfield woman—no doubt wondering what she could contribute—waited as trains loaded with soldiers pulled out of the station. She reached up and pushed a small object into a young man’s outstretched hands—a jar of preserved ginger.7 Women were not exempt from the call for help, and government officials asked for their assistance. One day Emily unfolded the local newspaper to read an appeal aimed directly at her. “The ladies of Amherst are urgently requested to take into immediate consideration the recent statement of the Secretary of the Sanitary Commission at Washington that among the contributions already forwarded there is a deficiency in the article of substantial woolen socks. . . . Our long pleasant evenings are before us and we take the liberty to suggest that every elderly, every middle aged, and every young lady in our town that they pledge themselves to contribute one or more pairs of socks.”† 8

  Emily chose not to knit socks, but she was busy. “I can’t stop to strut, in a world where bells toll,” she told the Hollands.9 Her pile of fascicles had grown. At least fifteen individual booklets were stacked nearby, all folded and stitched with thread. Emily was writing with the greatest intensity of her life. She had written over three-hundred poems—so many that some were loose and not bound. For several years she had been working on one poem that was unlike anything she had ever written. She couldn’t quite get it right and asked Sue for help. The verse consumed her and would embody every literary principle she embraced. Later that March day the poem would be made public. The work was a towering achievement, even if hardly anyone knew it was Emily’s.‡

  As much as Emily and Susan were devoted to each other, the two women had at times a contentious relationship. Emily could be annoyingly insistent, prodding Sue to write when she was away from home or demanding time when Sue’s hands were full. Austin and Sue’s first child, Ned, was less than a year old, and his care added to Sue’s preoccupation.§ Emily’s professions of love could also be suffocating and sometimes made her sister-in-law distance herself rather than draw closer. Sue had her faults too. She knew she could be cool and imperious, and once likened herself to someone who—while
“pronounced”—sweetened under chastisement and discipline.10 Around town Susan Dickinson earned respect for her intellect. “There is in her,” one young man said, “something different from other Amherst girls.” But some people noticed insensitivity and what one called no “refinement of feeling.”11 Helen Hunt experienced both sides of Susan Dickinson. The two initially enjoyed conversations and rambles through the woods. But after one huckleberry party, a falling-out occurred. Their quarrel made a sham of friendship, Helen said, and she vowed to have nothing more to do with her.12 There was no doubt Sue could be difficult. She seemed trapped, or wrestled with a foe only she could see. Even at the beginning of their relationship, Austin experienced Sue’s dark moods. Once during their engagement when he was cradling Sue in his arms, she expressed doubts about their impending marriage. The admission crushed Austin and he responded with an ultimatum: marry me or don’t. The next day he apologized and tried to retract his words, but the exchange already had damaged them both.13

  The first schism between Emily and her sister-in-law came in 1854, the summer after Austin and Sue became engaged. Austin had finished his education at Harvard Law School when Sue took mysteriously ill. She could barely eat, managing only broth and small bites of chicken. Emily worried and suspected nervous fever, remembering other times when Sue’s bouts of depression had sent her spiraling. She had contemplated suicide once.14 If Sue had anxieties about marriage, Emily would have understood. Emily thought marriage could threaten a woman’s intellect, imagination, and sense of self. She told Sue so in an earlier letter.

  You and I have been strangely silent upon this subject, Susie, we have often touched upon it, and as quickly fled away, as children shut their eyes when the sun is too bright for them. . . . Susie, we must speak of these things. How dull our lives must seem to the bride, and the plighted maiden, whose days are fed with gold, and who gathers pearls every evening; but to the wife, Susie, sometimes the wife forgotten, our lives perhaps seem dearer than all others in the world; you have seen flowers at morning, satisfied with the dew, and those same sweet flowers at noon with their heads bowed in anguish before the mighty sun; think you these thirsty blossoms will now need naught but – dew? No, they will cry for sunlight, and pine for the burning noon, tho’ it scorches them, scathes them; they have got through with peace – they know that the man of noon is mightier than the morning and their life is henceforth to him. Oh, Susie, it is dangerous.15

  Seeing no improvement in Sue’s condition, her sister Mattie whisked her to Albany to recuperate with relatives. With every mile away from the Dickinsons and marriage plans, Sue grew stronger.16 From New York she continued west to more relatives. Austin visited her in Chicago, but did not stay. During the time Sue was gone, Emily wrote frequent letters and pleaded for a response. Exasperated with not hearing a word, Emily finally put it bluntly. “Sue – you can go or stay – There is but one alternative – We differ often lately, and this must be the last. You need not fear to leave me lest I should be alone, for I often part with things I fancy I have loved. . . . Perhaps this is the point at which our paths diverge – then pass on singing Sue, and up the distant hill I journey on.”17 The letter must have felt to Sue like another high-toned Dickinson ultimatum. But there was a difference. This time Emily included a poem. “I have a Bird in spring,” it began, “Which for myself doth sing – .”18 The metaphor was hardly lost on Sue, and she understood that the last word in the poem—“Return”—carried special weight. A bird still sang and melody connected them, the poem suggested. Whether that melody represented the bond between the two women, the power of poetry, or something else—Sue understood its presence sustained Emily.

  The “go or stay” standoff between the women was not mentioned again. Sue returned to Amherst, and she and Austin were married. But around the time of Ned’s 1861 birth, tension resurfaced between Sue and Emily. Not wanting to risk another rupture, Sue offered a blanket apology: “If you have suffered this past Summer,” she wrote, “I am sorry. . . . I Emily bear a sorrow that I never uncover—If a nightingale sings with her breast against a thorn, why not we?”19 Sue knew that Emily often responded to unease by writing: tumult seemed to propel, not silence her. Emily already had shared over seventy-five poems with Sue—more than she had sent to anyone. There were poems about ambition, buried bulbs sprouting shoots, and unrealized success. There also were poems of rejection and deprivation. “A wounded Deer – leaps highest – ,” Emily observed in one poem. And in another,

  A little bread, a crust – a crumb,

  A little trust, a Demijohn –

  Can keep the soul alive – 20

  So many poems flew between the Dickinson Homestead and the Evergreens that Sue dubbed the route the “Pony Express.”21 As occupied as she was, Sue tried to make time for Emily’s work. She read the poems, studied them, and appeared to save every note, scrap, and word. When they first had become friends, Emily recognized that Sue understood her in ways that other girls did not. All her life, Emily searched for what she called “the rare Ear.”22 In Sue, she found one.

  But Sue didn’t know everything about Emily. She didn’t know that Emily had written another note to the unnamed Master and then another one after that. She didn’t know that Emily had professed her love and now pleaded with the Master to visit Amherst. The new letters were similar to the first one she had written: passionate, confounding, and unclear if they had been sent or retained as drafts. But there were differences. The vulnerability of the first letter had turned to ache. “I am older – tonight,” Emily wrote in the first of the two new letters,

  but the love is the same – so are the moon and the crescent. If it had been God’s will that I might breathe where you breathed – and find the place – myself – at night – if I (can) never forget that I am not with you – and that sorrow and frost are nearer than I – if I wish with a might I cannot repress – that mine were the Queen’s place – the love of the Plantagenet is my only apology . . . Have you the Heart in your breast – Sir – is it set like mine – a little to the left . . . I dont know what you can do for it – thank you – Master – but if I had the Beard on my cheek – like you – and you – had Daisy’s petals – and you cared so for me – what would become of you? Could you forget me in fight, or flight – or the foreign land? Could’nt Carlo, and you and I walk in the meadows an hour – and nobody care but the Bobolink . . . I used to think when I died – I could see you – so I died as fast as I could . . . but I can wait more – wait till my hazel hair is dappled – and you carry the cane – then I can look at my watch – and if the Day is too far declined – we can take the chances (of) for Heaven – What would you do with me if I came “in white?” Have you the little chest to put the Alive – in? I want to see you more – Sir – than all I wish for in this world – and the wish – altered a little – will be my only one – for the skies. Could you come to New England – (this summer – could) would you come to Amherst – Would you like to come – Master?23

  Emily was even more desolate in the letter that followed. Her sentences were torrents of words that stuttered and faltered and then regained their bearing. It seemed that even using the word “I” was too painful for Emily: she cushioned herself with a more distant reference, calling herself “she” and “Daisy” and her Master “it.” Most of all, she apologized—for what she did not say—and pleaded for her Master’s affection. Edits and second thoughts were more numerous, exposing the poet trapped in doubt, despair, panic, and subjugation.

  Oh, did I offend it – (Did’nt it want me to tell it the truth) Daisy – Daisy – offend it – who bends her smaller life to his (it’s) meeker (lower) every day . . . she cannot guess to make that master glad – A love so big it scares her, rushing among her small heart – pushing aside the blood and leaving her faint (all) and white in the gust’s arm. Daisy – who never flinched thro’ that awful parting, but held her life so tight he should not see the wound . . . tell her her (offence) fault – Master – if i
t is (not so) small eno’ to cancel with her life, (Daisy) she is satisfied – but punish – (do not) dont banish her – shut her in prison, Sir – only pledge that you will forgive – sometime – before the grave, and Daisy will not mind – She will awake in (his) your likeness. Wonder stings me more than the Bee . . . I’ve got a Tomahawk in my side but that dont hurt me much. (If you) Her Master stabs her more – . . . Master – open your life wide, and take me in forever, I will never be tired – I will never be noisy when you want to be still. I will be (glad) (as the) your best little girl – nobody else will see me, but you – but that is enough – I shall not want any more.24

  As searing as her words were, they may have provided release. Emily always turned to language to soothe or lessen her distress. The letters could have served as a reminder of the pain she had experienced, but survived. Whatever purpose she had in writing remained a secret known only to her. She never shied away from looking anguish in the eye or contemplating its aftermath. To do so was an act of dominion over misery and resistance to inertia. Emily placed the new letters with the old one, tucking all three away and out of sight.

  IN THE REMARKABLE new poem Emily was writing, there was no tone of anguish. “Safe in their alabaster chambers,” she began, drawing the first letter of the new poem with a bold S. Emily wanted to contrast the stasis of the dead with the vitality of the living. As she read over the poem and examined it, she swapped out commas for dashes, changed lowercase letters to capitals, and experimented with word choice. Something more fundamental also occupied her mind. She was thinking about the nature of literary imagery itself, possibly remembering the first sight of dandelions in Abiah Root’s hair and how the weeds had altered everything. She also had been reading Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “The Poet.” Where do images come from? Emerson asked. What should they do? How do they register in a reader’s consciousness? Emily recalled the copy of Emerson’s poems that one of her father’s long-ago law clerks had given her. The essays made clear—as sometimes Mr. Emerson’s poems did not—the qualities necessary for great poetry. Don’t be too clever with language, he warned. Avoid verse that is a “music-box of delicate tunes and rhythms.” Inspiration, he said, should come from the “picture-language” of nature—sunlight, air, and the living world around us. Emerson believed that beauty is more profound, when it is felt rather than explained. Emily thought about the poems in her fascicles with all their unidentified subjects. She had tried to capture the essence of an object by the way it made her feel, not necessarily by the way it looked. “As, in the sun, objects paint their images on the retina of the eye,” Emerson wrote, “so they, sharing the aspiration of the whole universe, tend to paint a far more delicate copy of their essence in his mind.”25 The idea of where images registered was important to Emily. It was not enough to paint a scene with detailed accuracy: the way an eye apprehended it. Adjectives could be piled deep, for example, in describing the multiple shades of a green leaf. But Emerson’s essay, with its talk of retinas and essence gave her an idea for creating an image that went beyond the retina, beyond what was literally recognizable. She wanted her language to awaken a deeper awareness than what the physical eye could perceive. If she could find the right abstraction and sensation, it might unlock the primeval human consciousness she hoped to touch.¶ Emily took her pencil and marked a passage in Emerson’s essay. “We are far from having exhausted the significance of the few symbols we use. We can come to use them yet with a terrible simplicity.”26