My Wars Are Laid Away in Books

by Alfred Habegger

  The girl was still in her mid-teens when she realized, with fine insight, that “it is my nature always to anticipate more than I realize.” One of the things she would anticipate—or invent in retrospect—was the truly masterful authority. A poem from her early thirties on the loss of innocence says that in time one

  . . . gains the skill

  Sorrowful – as certain –

  Men – to anticipate

  Instead of Kings –

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  What seems to have happened was that this waiting for kings helped shape her own strong drive for sovereign power.

  Although we will always wonder how one-sided Dickinson’s friendships were, her attachment to teachers does not seem to have been unreciprocated. Teachers are on the lookout for the rare, responsive, generously endowed student, and Emily was noticed by at least two of hers. Elizabeth C. Adams once sent her “a newspaper as large as life” and “a beautiful little bunch of pressed flowers.” But when Emily reciprocated with “a paper” (a composition?), no reply was received. “How much I would give to see her once more,” the girl confided. When Adams did finally return to “wield the sceptre, & sit upon the throne,” Emily was jubilant: “Oh! you cannot imagine how natural it seems to see her happy face in school once more.” Of course, the two were not equals: the pupil never first-named the sceptered Adams and was not given private notice of her resignation and engagement.

  The other teacher who recognized Emily was Daniel T. Fiske. Fifty years later, when Mabel Loomis Todd conducted a vigorous search for the poet’s letters, Fiske recalled his twelve-year-old scholar with impressive clarity:

  I have very distinct and pleasant impressions of Emily Dickinson, who was a pupil of mine in Amherst Academy in 1842–43. I remember her as a very bright, but rather delicate and frail looking girl: an excellent scholar: of exemplary deportment, faithful in all school duties: but somewhat shy and nervous. Her compositions were strikingly original: and in both thought and style seemed beyond her years, and always attracted much attention in the school and, I am afraid, excited not a little envy.

  This is the most rounded and dependable portrait on record of Emily as schoolgirl. Fiske must have been a keen observer, *33 as the impression he gathered and then retained for half a century accords in every particular with contemporary evidence, down to the implicit tension between the girl’s exemplary performance in all school duties and her striking originality. Looking back from her early twenties, Dickinson caught that tension in noting how “I used, now and then, to cut a timid caper.” In middle age she liked to pretend she had been a vagrant boy, and one of her late scraps says, “train up a Heart in the way it should go and as quick as it can ’twill depart from it.” But it hadn’t been that way for her as a shockingly grown-up yet precarious girl.

  One reason her frailty registered with Fiske was that he was a pioneering advocate of physical education. An early manuscript lecture of his assails “the imperfect ventilation of school rooms & churches” and says a good word for “the sports & shouts of children—their delight in mere noise without any special object—their fondness for running & jumping & other varieties of motion—their eagerness to be in the open air and sunlight.” The young man who wrote that must have been an unusually benign schoolmaster. He would have enjoyed Dickinson’s freedom-loving poem describing the letting-out of school at noon on Saturday:

  From all the Jails the Boys and Girls

  Ecstatically leap –

  Beloved only Afternoon

  That Prison does’nt keep –

  They storm the Earth And stun the Air,

  A Mob of solid Bliss –

  Alas – that Frowns should lie in wait

  For such a Foe as this –

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  The poem gains force if we remember that its author had been far from robust in girlhood, and by her early fifties, when she wrote it, was a kind of prisoner.

  Emily’s early handwriting, tiny and neat and utterly unlike her sister Lavinia’s careless scrawl, makes visible her tense girlish dutifulness. Once, as the end of a term approached, she confided to a friend that she was

  already gasping in view of our examination, and although I am determined not to dread it I know it is so foolish. Yet in spite of my heroic resolutions, I cannot avoid a few misgivings when I think of those tall, stern, trustees, and when I know that I shall lose my character if I dont recite as precise as the laws of the Medes and Persians.

  What loomed over her was not the teachers, always on her side (until she went to Mount Holyoke), but the patriarchal trustees. It was the law the young perfectionist was anxious about as she prepared for the academic contest in a community that put mind first and body second. That, and knowing she would be measured against her own sterling past performances.

  Herbarium

  Dickinson assembled two collections in her lifetime. The second, her bundles of poems found after her death, has become deservedly famous. The first, her sixty-six-page book of pressed flowers, has been all but ignored by her biographers.

  The herbarium is a collection of dried plants kept in a large leather volume manufactured for the purpose. Eleven by thirteen inches, it has a dark green spine and an embossed floral cover and still carries the bookseller’s sticker (G. & C. Merriam, Springfield). Inside are four or five hundred specimens of flowers, wild and cultivated. Once picked, they were neatly laid out, pressed, dried, and, with the help of a botanical manual, identified. The current scientific name, followed by two numbers, was written in ink on a narrow strip of paper placed over the stem and pasted to the page. Sometimes the upper parts were held in place by narrower strips. Roots are not shown, only the flowers and upper stem and one or more leaves. Each page contains several specimens in a neat and artistic arrangement.

  Although it isn’t known whether Emily’s mother kept an herbarium, she was so fond of her cultivated plants that Edward sometimes reassured her when she left home that her plants were “safe & flourishing.” As the Bullard portrait of the Dickinson children shows, Emily had acquired a similar interest by 1840. Two letters from 1842 and 1845, both written in May, name botany as a school subject. Possibly, it was in the latter year, when she was fourteen, that she began assembling her collection. “I have been to walk tonight,” she informed a friend on May 7, “and got some very choice wild flowers.” Have you made “an Herbarium yet,” she went on to ask. “I hope you will if you have not, it would be such a treasure to you, most all the girls are making one. If you do perhaps I can make some additions to it from flowers growing around here.” The pressed flowers sent by Elizabeth C. Adams may be in Emily’s herbarium.

  The textbook in use at Amherst Academy was Almira Hart Lincoln’s Familiar Lectures on Botany. Formerly a teacher and acting principal at Troy Female Seminary, Lincoln (later Phelps) wrote this textbook under the guidance of Amos Eaton, a lecturer at the Rensselaer School and a botanical authority. Thanks in part to Eaton’s encouragement of women scientists (his sister-in-law, Laura Johnson, was the author of Botanical Teacher for North America), Troy became a center for the propagation of botanical studies. It is surely no mere coincidence that Emily showed so much excitement about herbariums during the term the “young Lady from Troy” was employed by the academy.

  The author of several other scientific textbooks, Lincoln Phelps was eventually elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science—the third woman so honored. She shared the widespread view that botany was “peculiarly adapted to females; the objects of its investigation are beautiful and delicate; its pursuits, leading to exercise in the open air, are conducive to health and cheerfulness.” But she also stressed the intellectual value of this science—its stimulus of the mind’s capacity to group objects into “beautiful and regular systems.” The mysterious numbers that Emily added to her identifying labels show how much her teacher emphasized this aspect of systematics. According to the Linnaean or “artificial” system, the number of stamens in a flower deter
mined its “class,” and the number of pistils its “order.” Since, for example, the cardinal flower, Lobelia cardinalis, has five stamens and one pistil, it would belong in the fifth class, first order. Eaton’s Manual of Botany, for North America, the book Emily may have consulted in order to identify her specimens, recommended that the label include these numbers to “facilitate the process of arranging specimens in the herbarium.”

  Emily followed Eaton’s advice, up to a point. After writing Lobelia cardinalis and Lobelia inflata on her specimen labels, she added the numbers 5.1. to each. But then she placed these congeneric plants on different pages. One finds a few related species grouped together—buttercups, geraniums, anemones, violets, pipsissewa, and spotted wintergreen—but by and large her order of arrangement had nothing to do with the Linnaean system. She also included duplicates and became increasingly lax in her identifications. The effort to discern exact principles of order in the poet’s later manuscript books seems undercut by the herbarium, which shows a declining interest in nomenclature, systematics, organization. Chances are, she did what most people would do: added specimens as they were collected and became ready. That may be how her poems were assembled, for the most part.

  An early poem makes fun of the exact classificatory system she inked onto so many schoolgirl labels:

  I pull a flower from the woods –

  A monster with a glass

  Computes the stamens in a breath –

  And has her in a “class”!

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  The stanza accurately describes the “artificial” system’s stamen-counting procedure. By the late 1850s, when Dickinson copied the poem into her packets, this system had been pretty well discarded by botanists. One wonders whether she knew that.

  The stamens and pistils that most flowers possess are the male and female sexual organs. That the poet thought of flowers as female suggests her love of plants owed more to culture than science. Although she always made use of scientific names and the technical terms of plant anatomy, the rich human meanings that flowers accrued for her had little to do with botany as such. Closely associated with particular seasons, flowers helped articulate the seasons of the spirit. Pressed between the pages of a letter, they became a medium of exchange between her and her friends, those of her own sex especially. Cultivated indoors, especially after a conservatory was added to the Dickinson Homestead, they became a consuming avocation.

  One aspect of herbarium-making that left an indelible mark on the poet-in-the-making was her experience in the field. Nothing was quite so thrilling as the discovery or acquisition of a new kind, as when she was shown her first mignonette by Aunt Catharine or lost a shoe wading for cardinal flowers. The memory of that experience, not “5.1.,” determined what Lobelia cardinalis came to mean for her. “I had long heard of an Orchis before I found one, when a child,” she wrote at age forty-five, “but the first clutch of the stem is as vivid now, as the Bog that bore it.” Her herbarium has the yellow fringed orchis (Habenaria ciliaris) and the larger purple fringed orchis (H. fimbriata). One of these may be the trophy of that avid clutch.

  In later years fragrant daphne became the “dearest” of flowers for her, but always with this qualification: “except Wild flowers – those are dearer.” With many of these, such as the brilliant and fugitive cardinal flower, *34 a late-summer bloom that prefers the shade “of some black and winding brook” (Higginson’s words), there were strong personal associations. “One of the sweetest Messages I ever received,” the poet wrote in her fifties, “was, ‘Mrs [Susan] Dickinson sent you this Cardinal Flower, and told me to tell you she thought of you.’” But young Emily was also “haunted” by the white saprophytic Indian pipe and “ecstatic puff-ball,” which get nutrition from decaying plant matter instead of chlorophyll and sunlight. When Mabel Loomis Todd sent her a painted panel of Indian pipes in 1882, the poet generously replied: “That without suspecting it you should send me the preferred flower of life, seems almost supernatural. . . . I still cherish the clutch with which I bore it from the ground when a wondering Child, an unearthly booty.” One Amherst woman remembered a spot called Rattlesnake Gutter as “the only place to my knowledge where we could find the spectral Indian pipe.” Todd’s depiction of these flowers was reproduced on the title page of the first edition of Dickinson’s poems.

  This consuming interest in finding and collecting is best appreciated by those who, like Colette or Vladimir Nabokov or E. O. Wilson, become absorbed as children in a sector of the natural order. Persisting for a time from one growing season to the next, Emily’s passion was regularly frustrated by winter. “When Flowers annually died and I was a child,” she recalled, “I used to read Dr Hitchcock’s Book on the Flowers of North America. *35 This comforted their Absence – assuring me they lived.”

  Chances are that Emily’s parents saw her quest for specimens as a salutary outdoor activity, and that she expanded her herbarium in summer 1846, when a persistent cough and depressed spirits required her to drop out of school and (as she put it) “ride & roam in the fields.” After her death, Lavinia told an inquirer that “when we were little children we used to spend entire days in the woods hunting for treasures.” A girlhood friend, Emily Fowler, recalled “two excursions to Mount Norwottock, five miles away, where we found the climbing fern, and came home laden with pink and white trilliums, and later, yellow lady’s-slippers.” The herbarium has a few trilliums but no yellow lady’s slipper.

  Since many wild plants are highly localized and have a brief flowering season, serious collecting requires close observation and persistent wandering. Having accompanied her younger friend on her “woodland walks,” Emily Fowler was impressed by the extent of her knowledge: she “knew the wood-lore of the region round about, and could name the haunts and the habits of every wild or garden growth within her reach.” How exploratory was she? In Mary Adèle Allen’s recollection, the fringed gentian was so rare in the vicinity of Amherst “that we were early taught to leave it.” This late-season flower is on page 21 of Dickinson’s collection, and in several poems as well. Checking the herbarium against Edward Hitchcock’s Catalogue of Plants . . . in the Vicinity of Amherst College, which names the localities of less common species, one finds ten of these special plants. They include Orobanche americana [now O. uniflora], or cancerroot (it grew on Mount Holyoke, Hitchcock noted); Verbena augustifolia (found in South Hadley), and Rhodora canadensis. Dickinson also had Blitum capitatum, or strawberry blite, one of the few Hitchcock called “Rare.”

  Clearly, even though Emily may have been given specimens by others, she developed a close firsthand acquaintance with the surrounding countryside. It was as Lincoln said: “the love of native wild flowers is . . . greatly heightened by the habit of seeking them out, and observing them in their peculiar situations.”

  As for the fear of wandering by herself, years later the poet noted that “when much in the Woods as a little Girl, I was told that the Snake would bite me, that I might pick a poisonous flower, *36 or Goblins kidnap me, but I went along and met no one but Angels, who were far shyer of me, than I could be of them.” Eventually, she looked back at this free and fearless outdoor sauntering as a defining activity of her life “when a boy”—a phrase that became indispensable to her after her habits of seclusion were established. *37 It shows up in “A narrow fellow in the grass,” her well-known poem on the snake:

  He likes a Boggy Acre

  A Floor too cool for Corn

  Yet when a Boy, and Barefoot –

  I more than once at Noon

  Have passed, I thought, a Whip lash

  Unbraiding in the Sun

  When stooping to secure it

  It wrinkled, and was gone . . .

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  When her friend Samuel Bowles read this about 1866, he reportedly exclaimed, “How did that girl ever know that a boggy field wasn’t good for corn?” Her sister-in-law’s apposite reply: “Oh, you forget that was Emily ‘when a boy’!” And in fact the sp
eaker in this tricky poem is not male but a woman who was once a boy.

  By the time Dickinson could see herself as transsexual (so to speak, of course), her girlhood, like the cardinal flower, had undergone a splitting metamorphosis into the life of the imagination. Only if we keep in mind what the huge childhood herbarium implies—the rich and varied pleasures of roaming the outdoors, searching and finding, alone or with others—can we estimate the cost of that metamorphosis. Eye-opening, it was also blinding, as she suggests in one of her most painful poems:

  Before I got my eye put out

  I liked as well to see –

  As other Creatures, that have Eyes

  And know no other way –

  But were it told to me – today –

  That I might have the sky

  For mine – I tell you that my Heart

  Would split, for size of me –

  The Meadows – mine –

  The Mountains – mine –

  All Forests – Stintless Stars –

  As much of Noon as I could take

  Between my finite eyes –