# Ralph Franklin believes “We play at Paste” may have been written in direct response to Higginson’s article. [Ralph Franklin, ed. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), 24.]
Seven
BULLETINS ALL DAY FROM IMMORTALITY
7 p.m. November 11, 1864: Thermometer 35.6 degrees, clouds 0, Winds NW 2, Therm Attached to Barometer 51.2. Barometer Observed Height 29.532 Dry Bulb 35.0 Wet Bulb 40,532.0 Humidity 70% Remarks: Cloudy and Chilly.
—Ebenezer Snell, The Meteorological Journal Kept at Amherst College
Evening was calm and clear, vivid moonlight.
—Cambridge (Mass.) Chronicle, Nov. 11, 1864
Thomas Wentworth Higginson answered immediately. He wanted to know more. He wanted to know everything. And he barraged Emily with questions.* How old are you? How long have you been writing? What writers do you read? What kind of education have you had? Who are your companions? Tell me about your family. Have you read Walt Whitman? In her return letter, Emily apologized for not responding sooner, although it had been only a matter of days. “You asked how old I was?” she wrote. “I made no verse – but one or two – until this winter – Sir.”1 Her response was confusing and in a sense, true. Emily measured everything by a yardstick of poetry. But her answer also made clear that she did not want Mr. Higginson to know how long she had been working at her craft or that she had written hundreds of poems. Other answers were similarly coy, such as one about her companions. “Hills – Sir,” she wrote, “and the Sundown – and a Dog – large as myself, that my Father bought me – They are better than Beings – because they know – but do not tell.” She said her family consisted of a brother and sister, a mother who “does not care for thought,” and a father who bought her books but begged her not to read them. He “fears they joggle the Mind,” she added. She shrugged off her study at Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke by saying, “I went to school – but in your manner of the phrase – had no education.” Her literary influence, she reported, included the Revelations, Keats, Ruskin, Mr. and Mrs. Browning, and Sir Thomas Browne.† When it came to expressing her opinions of the Church, Emily was unequivocal. Her family was “religious – except me,” she said, “and address an Eclipse, every morning – whom they call their ‘Father.’” She dispatched his question about Walt Whitman with a wave of the hand. “I never read his Book – but was told that he was disgraceful.”‡
Emily told Higginson other things, too, and with rare candor. She wrote of tutors—her father’s young law clerks—who had taken her early literary ambition seriously. “My dying Tutor told me that he would like to live till I had been a poet,” she said. For years, she continued, “my Lexicon – was my only companion.”2 She carefully chose details to paint herself as a solitary writer in search of a teacher. Multiple times she expressed frustration in being ill equipped to evaluate her own work. “While my thought is undressed,” she wrote, “I can make the distinction, but when I put them in the Gown – they look alike, and numb.”3 Something happened, she suggested, between the thinking stage and the moment she put pen to paper. “I could not weigh myself – Myself” was the way she put it.4 Yet as much as Emily emphasized an amateur status, she could not resist telling Higginson that professionals were interested in her work. Two editors had called on her at home. They “asked me for my Mind,” she said, adding they “would use it for the World.”5 As usual, Emily was silent about specifics that others might have shared. She could have been more forthcoming about the identity of the editors—Higginson would surely have known them—but she said no more. She also hid the fact that she had already published poems.§ The most striking absence concerned Sue. Her astute sister-in-law did not merit a single word, not even as a member of the family.
Shortly after their correspondence began, Emily Dickinson would be overcome by adversity. Her burgeoning literary relationship with Thomas Wentworth Higginson would be threatened as her physical health faltered. “The Physician has taken away my Pen,” she would tell him.6 Emily had begun to notice serious problems with her eyesight a year before contacting Higginson, although the disease may have begun its insidious advance much earlier.¶ For the woman who keenly observed the world around her, the thought of losing her vision was terrifying. Emily’s crisis reached a peak on a cold November night in 1864—not in at her home in Amherst—but in a boardinghouse in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She knew she was at a turning point. She wanted to write more poems, but she didn’t know if her eyesight would allow it. The letters she had already exchanged with Higginson made her realize that a larger world beyond Amherst and Springfield was interested in her work. In the perilous situation she was in, Emily recognized she was not who she once had been. But she also knew she wanted to be more.
In the time before her health problems escalated, Emily and Higginson inched toward each other—he posing questions and she responding or dodging them—and they settled into comfortable roles as teacher and student. Her eagerness to be instructed must have been irresistible to Higginson. “I would like to learn,” she told him. “Could you tell me how to grow – or is it unconveyed – like Melody – or Witchcraft?”7 He had done his best in offering advice, noting that when a shift in word choice could have provided a rhyme, she rejected it. She opted instead for surprise and defiance of form. Miss Dickinson didn’t appear to be careless or motivated by whim, he thought.8 Rather she seemed to be reaching for something more evocative—an arresting bump in rhythm, a rhyme more minor-key than major, or an image as startling as those in her alabaster poem: “Dots, On a Disc of Snow.” Her refusal to conform, he would learn, had less to do with satisfying the reader’s expectations than upending them.
Emily wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson nearly every month when they first began corresponding. She relished his queries, later telling him, “You ask great questions accidentally.”9 Members of her own family had given up questioning Emily—about her reclusiveness, her resistance to travel, or mysterious callers such as Reverend Wadsworth. Since Emily and Higginson had never met, their relationship was built on letters only, words she could manipulate or hide behind. Letters were “the Mind alone, without corporeal friend,” she had said.10 Do you have a photograph, Higginson once had asked.# No, she replied—but I “am small, like the Wren, and my Hair is bold, like the Chestnut Bur – and my eyes, like the Sherry in the Glass, that the Guest leaves.”11 When he had suggested she wait to publish, she scoffed. “I smile when you suggest that I delay ‘to publish’ – that being foreign to my thought, as Firmament to Fin – If fame belonged to me, I could not escape her . . . My Barefoot-Rank is better.”12 He asked about her seclusion and received a playful, cagey reply. “Of ‘shunning Men and Women’ – they talk of Hallowed things, aloud – and embarrass my Dog.”13 There was also conversation about the work itself. Higginson had asked about her poem’s perplexing pronouns and she told him she was not writing autobiography. “When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse,” she declared, “it does not mean – me – but a supposed person.”14 It was one of the most emphatic comments of her life.
Perhaps most revealing was her description of how it felt to write a poem. Nature, she said, was an inspiration. The impulse to create occurred to her on walks when the sight of a tree or an angle of light would suddenly seize her. At that moment she simply had to transform what she saw into words, she said, and the urge affected her physically. “A sudden light on Orchards, or a new fashion in the wind troubled my attention,” she explained, “a palsy, here – the Verses just relieve.” At those moments something took hold of her—violently. “My little Force explodes,” she told Higginson, “and leaves me bare and charred.”15 Yet as forthcoming as she could be, Emily continued to be elusive. Higginson quickly realized he was not dealing with an amateur poet—the kind who taxed his generosity and peeved his wife. He worried Emily might be too brilliant for him, beyond his ability to help. When he told her so, she tossed aside the concern. Sh
e was used to men not understanding her. They always asked her to repeat what she said or explain herself in plain language. “All men say ‘What’ to me,” she admitted, with a touch of weariness.16 But Thomas Wentworth Higginson seemed different to her; he was willing, steady, open, someone who would not interrupt or ask what in the world she was talking about. When his letters to her stopped suddenly, she was alarmed. Perhaps she had told him too much.
“Did I displease you, Mr Higginson,” she urgently wrote him in October 1862.17 She had not. As much as Emily had shared with her correspondent, she knew little about him. Months after their correspondence began, Higginson had joined the Union Army. He was thirty-eight. Dickinson had no idea Captain Higginson had been drilling troops at Camp John Wool in Worcester fifty miles away from Amherst. Higginson’s entire life had been a battle between two poles: a life of the mind and one committed to action. The decision to put aside his literary career for a political cause was a familiar one. Three years earlier, he’d been one of the Secret Six who’d financially supported John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry, and, before that, he’d brought axes to Boston’s Faneuil Hall to help abolitionists free a captured slave. The summer of 1862, when President Lincoln had called for 300,000 more troops, Higginson found he could not live with himself. It was unprincipled, he believed, to spend his days writing nature essays for the Atlantic when other men risked their lives.** “I never could hold up my head again, in Worcester or even elsewhere, if I did not vindicate my past words by actions though tardy,” he said.18 Within weeks Union officers put him in charge of preparing young and untested Worcester boys. Later that fall he was promoted and reassigned; Captain Higginson would become a colonel and assume leadership of the first Negro regiment of Union soldiers.†† Emily read about it in the Republican. “I should have liked to see you, before you became improbable,” she wrote, her letter somehow catching up with him in camp off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina.19 She had hoped to meet him in person, but a visit would have to wait. “Best Gains – must have the Losses’ Test,” she said. She had no idea how prophetic she was.20
At first things went well for Colonel Higginson. He was impressed with his troops, did well in recruiting others from nearby rice plantations, and understood he had to earn the respect of Negro soldiers who had reason to doubt the goodwill of any white man. He gained his soldiers’ trust by listening to stories about their families and lobbying for pay parity with white Union troops.‡‡ Yet as much as he found purpose in training soldiers, Higginson yearned for real battles instead of meaningless skirmishes. He soon received his wish. While commanding 250 troops in a transport boat headed up the South Edisto River, Higginson’s boat snagged and became a target. Confederates fired from bluffs and he was hit on the side. He didn’t know with what. A bullet? A piece of wood? A spent shell? Higginson survived and was hospitalized, but did not improve. “I am in rather a state of collapse,” he finally confessed to his mother.21 His old friend Louisa May Alcott volunteered to come south and help him regain strength.§§
When the letters from Higginson stopped as he convalesced, Emily sent another frantic note.22 She had reason to feel on edge. Problems with her eyesight had been worsening and she was anxious. There were good days and bad, she said, and that intermittency only exacerbated the misery. She never knew when pain and blurriness would hit, and she didn’t know if the problem had gone away for good or would come back with greater intensity. Lately the trouble had become so serious her family thought she needed medical help from a specialist in Boston. Her symptoms were many: sensitivity to light, headache, pain around the eyes, eyestrain, tearing, diminished clarity, fatigue from any task that demanded concentration from her eyes—certainly writing. Sometimes her eyes felt gritty, as if she were standing in a dusty field on a windy day. Daytime itself had become an enemy. Bright lights, reflections off snow, even a glint of light off white paper caused problems. The sun was even worse. It felt dangerous, and triggered every affliction—ache, fuzziness, and disorientation. Staying indoors on bright days and not being able to garden must have felt like incarceration to her. While Emily may not have articulated it, the psychological effects of her diminished sight had to take a toll too. Household tasks were more difficult to accomplish, making her less independent and reliant on others to help. With reduced vision, she had to be more vigilant, keenly aware of what she couldn’t do or couldn’t see. She may have seen things that weren’t there because her eyes could not be depended on for precision. She sought the dark during daylight and inhabited the night—upside down with the natural order of the day. Her life had become liminal, experienced in a twilight where sensory experience could not be fully felt. In place of sharp perception—what she had depended on and used to such a rich extent in her poetry—was now dimness, ambiguity, and haze.23
Emily knew something was profoundly wrong, and she would probably need to leave Amherst for diagnosis and treatment. When his children were young, Edward Dickinson always worried about their eyes. He told Austin to ease up on studying, as if he had a premonition that reading would lead to blindness. When Edward caught Emily stealing a few snatches of Melville one morning after her eye problems had become worse, he scolded her.24 She also seemed to have given up reading newspapers. She did not know Higginson had been wounded, even though the Republican had reported it. Neither did she know Major Hunt had been killed—her friend Helen’s husband—the man whose humor about Carlo and gravity had delighted her.¶¶ Writing to her Norcross cousins, Emily admitted she felt desolate. “Nothing has happened but loneliness, perhaps too daily to relate,” she wrote.25 Carlo stood by her, as faithful a dog as he always had been, but she was discouraged and frightened.26 On top of everything else, the house was cold, she was forced to wear a bonnet indoors, and when she reported on the weather she wrote, “No frost at our house yet. Thermometer frost, I mean.”27 In February 1864—with Vinnie by her side—thirty-three-year-old Emily met with a physician in Boston. Dr. Henry Williams, New England’s preeminent ophthalmologist, might know what to do. He was known as an excellent surgeon and prolific scholar. Williams suggested a treatment, and—as Emily feared—she would have to move near him for care.## Cousins Fanny and Loo offered a solution for lodging. Emily could move into the Cambridge boardinghouse where they resided and travel across the river to Boston for treatments with Dr. Williams. She had only two months to prepare for the long stay and an uncertain future. She would be busy.
It was one thing for Emily to gather up her belongings and say goodbye to her dog and the rest of her family. It was quite another to step away from her desk and her poetry. Something remarkable happened that spring of 1864 as she made plans to move to Cambridge. She published more poetry—all anonymously—than at any other time in her life. Anonymity had always suited her; it protected her privacy and seclusion. Within months, five poems appeared in six different publications, and in newspapers and magazines from Brooklyn to Boston. Her sunset verse, “Blazing in gold, and quenching in purple,” appeared first on February 29 in the Drum Beat, a daily newspaper released during the two-week Brooklyn Fair. Proceeds from the fair supported the US Sanitary Commission aiding injured Union soldiers. Dickinson admitted she could not refuse to “help the sick and wounded soldiers,” yet it was unclear—as it always was—just how involved she was in submitting the verse.***28 After the poem appeared in the Drum Beat, it was also published in the Springfield Daily Republican and once more in the weekend edition. Three days later a second verse was published in the Drum Beat, “Flowers – well, if anybody.” The poem made the rounds in the Republican too. It also appeared in the Boston Post. No doubt a Boston editor who liked the work had simply clipped it out of the Drum Beat or the Republican and republished it in his paper without comment or authorization. Who knows how many editors in Chicago, Philadelphia, or Cincinnati did the same? Nine days after the flower poem, a third verse appeared, her elegy “These are the days when birds come back.” The next day a fourth was published, “Some k
eep the Sabbath going to church,” and circulated in the Round Table, a national literary magazine from New York. At the end of April, a fifth poem, “Success is counted sweetest” was published in the Brooklyn Daily Union. Readership for the five poems in six publications was impressive. The Drum Beat published 6,000 copies of the newspaper every day. The ambitious Round Table rivaled the Atlantic, and boasted of readers from Chicago, Boston, and London. The Boston Post’s circulation was 9,500 daily, and the readership for Samuel Bowles’s Daily Republican stood at 15,000, the weekly at 14,000, and was for sale on newsstands all over New England. Although they did not realize it, thousands of people were reading Emily Dickinson in the spring of 1864, and a circle of New York literary men were doing their best to promote her.†††29 But Emily sought no further exchanges with the editors and did not take advantage of their publishing connections to further her work.30 The explosion of publications ended when she dropped her bags in Fanny and Loo’s rooms in late April 1864.‡‡‡ Certainly Emily wanted to aid the Union cause, but the flurry of published poems suggests she may have had another concern. Worried about her eyes and the possible end of her creative production, Emily may have wanted to make her mark while she still could.31
As improbable as it sounded, Colonel Higginson could have seen some of Emily’s New York publications while he was in camp, recovering from his wounds. Earlier she had sent him “Success is counted sweetest” and “Some keep the Sabbath going to Church”; he would have recognized the poems even though they had been published anonymously.32 He might also have been aware of Dickinson’s burst of publication through soldiers’ unsanctioned gift exchanges across enemy lines. When Confederate and Union forces were not engaged in combat, pickets often rigged up small boats and floated gifts, including newspapers, to their counterparts across the river.§§§ Massachusetts troops across the Rappahannock River in Virginia sailed copies of the Springfield Republican and received issues of the Richmond Daily Dispatch in return. During the spring of 1864, it was possible that Emily’s two poems in the Republican may have sailed aboard clandestine crafts and ended up in Higginson’s hands.33
These Fevered Days Page 15