My Wars Are Laid Away in Books

by Alfred Habegger

  That the man knew he was insolvent explains his risky last-minute renewal of his life insurance. But his wife still ended up on the poor farm.

  The thank-you letter Emily sent in February lacks a salutation but probably went to Hale, not Hill:

  I thank you when you tell me that he was brave, and patient – and that he dared to die.

  I thought he would not fear, because his soul was – valiant – but that they met, and fought, and that my Brother conquered, and passed on triumphing, blessed it is to know.

  Her response to Hale’s expressed wish that she “might have passed an hour” with Newton is worth noting: “To purchase such an one I would have offered worlds, had they been mine to bring, but hours like those are costly, and most too poor to buy.”

  A few years later, as if uneasy about the naïveté of her initial query, the poet sent Hale a strange reminder: “Perhaps you forget a Stranger maid, who several springs ago – asked of a Friend’s Eternity, and if in her simplicity, she still remembers you, and culls for you a Rose, and hopes upon a purer morn, to pluck you buds serener – please pardon her, and them.” It is an apology for remembering in a world that can be trusted to forget. If the “buds serener” mean the poems she had begun to make, the passage (itself iambic) hints at the sequence by which she converted an obsession with heaven into her work as poet.

  Emmons and the Honeybee

  The poet’s most intriguing literary friendship of the mid-1850s began half a year after Newton’s surprise marriage. If the attorney was a virtual “elder brother,” Henry Vaughan Emmons might be thought of as a fraternal twin, albeit two years younger. He came to Amherst College in 1851 from Hallowell, Maine, where his father, Judge Williams Emmons, a pious and well-educated Websterian Whig, had the same secure position in the local hierarchy as Edward Dickinson in Amherst. *87 The young man’s mother had been a Vaughan, one of an extraordinarily cultivated family with a private library said to be four-fifths the size of Harvard’s. Her father, educated in England by Joseph Priestley, had been private secretary to Lord Shelburne. The boy’s other grandfather, the Reverend Nathanael Emmons, had coached Samuel Fowler Dickinson in Calvinist theology in the 1790s. Now, sixty years later, their grandchildren would put their heads together to construct an aesthetic alternative to New England’s suddenly decaying orthodoxy.

  Henry seems to have been an exceptionally self-defined and learned young man. Entering college as a sophomore after having once run away from home, he broke the mold in a second way by rooming off campus all three years. By February 1852 he and Emily were well enough acquainted that she accompanied “Sophomore Emmons” one evening on a ride—“alone,” as she emphasized to Austin. To Sue she described him as her “beautiful, new, friend.” More rides and walks followed, along with evenings in the Dickinson home, often in the company of his roommate and her cousin John Long Graves. In June, when Vinnie attended the Senior levee, Henry and Emily went for a walk together.

  The notes Emily sent Henry over the next two years tell of a friendship that was not so much romantic as intensely literary and “spiritual.” Before long, they were exchanging compositions. “Since receiving your beautiful writing,” she told him, “I have often desired to thank you thro’ a few of my flowers, and arranged the fairest for you.” She added, “I have very few today, and they compare but slightly with the immortal blossoms you kindly gathered me, but will you please accept them – the ‘Lily of the field’ for the blossoms of Paradise, and if ’tis ever mine to gather those which fade not, from the garden we have not seen, you shall have a brighter one than I can find today.” Within her guarded and humble forecast (the syntax and diction of which anticipate her last note to Hale) lurked a shy admission of poetic ambition. When Henry replied with a “beautiful acknowledgment,” she politely reminded him that “while with pleasure I lend you the little manuscript, I shall beg leave to claim it.” Her next note was sharper: “Please recollect if you will two little volumes of mine which I thoughtlessly lend [sic] you.” Behind this anxiety lay memories of 1850, when a Valentine sent to a student editor ended up in the now defunct Indicator.

  As Emily knew, Henry was also an editor, having recently taken the lead in founding a college literary magazine. In the prospectus he drafted for this venture, the high-minded young man hoped “to counteract the many adverse influences at work in the present college tone” and correct the impression that Amherst lacked “cultivation—literary power.” Comparing the school to Yale, he wrote that “the bees are always swarming there—and fill the air with their buzzing clamor—while here they are silently at work making honey.”

  In its first year of publication, the Collegiate Magazine ran eleven of Emmons’s labored and earnest essays, all of them clogged with an unusually imagistic prose. Interested in great men and turning points, he was drawn to the Renaissance as a time of lofty aspiration, to the power of the imagination and humane learning. “Power” was a key word for him, but not the power of logic, system, will—the strenuously rational orthodoxy his grandfather Nathanael had epitomized. Rather, it was the power of lambent symbols and images—those bees silently at work.

  Two of Emmons’s essays help unpack Dickinson’s early sense of herself as poet. “Poetry the Voice of Sorrow,” published October 1853, proposes that God appoints a select few to “listen to His voice more nearly than other men.” These are the poets, who, like Jacob, “wrestle with the angel of sorrow till he leaves a blessing upon them,” after which they “bring peace and beauty to common men”; they are the true tribe of Levi. As Emmons worked the idea out, he quoted “A Vision of Poets” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning: “Knowledge by suffering entereth,/And Life is perfected by Death!” These lines (a Victorian commonplace) are heavily marked in Sue’s copy of Barrett Browning’s collected poetry, acquired in 1853.

  As Dickinson moved toward a deeper understanding of herself and her vocation in 1853–1854, “A Vision of Poets” seems to have played a vital role. This thousand-line narrative, variously flat, verbose, and thrilling, sets forth a dream vision of the pantheon of poets—“king-poets” as Barrett Browning calls them, though they include one woman, Sappho. Where each poet’s heart should be, the dreamer sees “a wound instead of it/From whence the blood dropped to their feet.” Asked if they are satisfied to pay their heart’s blood for their art, they “bent/Their awful brows and said ‘Content.’” Over all, the work presents poetry as analogous to Scripture, with poets serving as saints and martyrs, a select group of wounded saviors.

  For Dickinson, this view had great appeal and relevance, if only because it suggested a way to deploy the evangelicalism she could not accept in doctrinal form. The solution (following Bushnell and Park) was to aestheticize it—to transform orthodoxy into a drama of which the suffering poet is the central figure. That is the program many of her later poems work out, such as the one that begins, “The Martyr Poets – did not tell –/But wrought their Pang in syllable” (Fr665).

  The second essay, “The Words of Rock Rimmon,” was prompted by one of the mountain-naming excursions Edward Hitchcock annually staged. This time Emmons made a daring personal application of Barrett Browning’s “Vision.” On June 6, 1854, a large group of Amherst College students and others ascended a granite knob in Belchertown that was to be known henceforth (but hasn’t been) as Rock Rimmon. In the elaborate program, a professor spoke about mountains as “a source of inspiration to much of our finest literature,” citing the Psalmist, Greek and Latin poets, Milton, Wordsworth, and Byron. Emmons was master of ceremonies.

  Though Dickinson wouldn’t have been present, she paid the closest attention to Emmons’s dreamy account of what happened afterward during a solitary all-night vigil on the newly named hilltop. In this narrative, published in the Collegiate Magazine in July 1854, the gigantic spirits of the Holyoke Range and other peaks approach Rock Rimmon and listen as its Spirit remembers the sacred events associated with certain biblical mountains. The ancient geological upheavals in Mass
achusetts also had a secret purpose, the Spirit announces: to prepare New England for its errand of saving the world. Then day breaks, and as the sole human observer gazes on the plain below, he feels a “strange earnestness thrilling in my heart.” The essay ends with a tercet from “A Vision of Poets”:

  The golden morning’s open flowings,

  Did sway the trees to murmurous bowings,

  In metric chant of blessed poems.

  In Barrett Browning, these lines belong to the climactic moment in which an aspiring poet “journeyed homeward through the wood.” In Emmons, they express an ardent youthful dream of joining the ancient school of true poets.

  He graduated in August 1854, by which time Commencement had become an old story for Dickinson—the speechmaking, the dusty booths on the Common, the hordes of curious onlookers mixed with returning alumni, many in clerical collars. Now that she was about to lose one of her closest friends, however, the annual event proved unusually packed, painful, and clarifying. Busy as she was with the work of hospitality, she had some private time with Henry, and also with Eliza M. Coleman, who evidently stayed with the Dickinsons. Afterward, as Eliza prepared to leave, she opened Emily’s Bible and made a penciled bracket around the eight verses of Psalm 121, which begins, “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.” As if to memorialize the moment, Eliza wrote in the margin, “E.M.C. 14 th. Aug t 1854.” The next day Emily wrote John Graves, “Quite sad it is when friends go, and sad when all are gone, to sit by pensive window, and recollect them.”

  Contributing to the pensive intensity was Emmons’s recently announced engagement to Susan D. Phelps, of Hadley. When the news was imparted to Dickinson, she at once appointed a ride with him so that the two could “speak of her.” Declaring her heart “full of joy,” the poet earnestly “thank[ed] the Father who’s given her to you,” adding, “My hand trembles.” She may have been quoting his recently published paragraph on strong feeling, which says that when “deep emotion chokes the utterance” the soul finds other avenues of expression, such as “the trembling frame.”

  For Dickinson, a great many things—friendship, loneliness, the wounded heart, poetic ambition, sacred mountains—were coming together in a very tight package. Before leaving, Emmons sent her a literary gift of some kind. Her thank-you and farewell begins, “I find it Friend – I read it – I stop to thank you for it, just as the world is still – I thank you for them all – the pearl, and then the onyx, and then the emerald stone.” Though her references are obscure, she was drawing on the opulent imagery of Revelation 21, where the gates of the New Jerusalem are said to be of pearl and the fourth and fifth foundations are adorned with emerald and sardonyx. *88 Perhaps she was likening his gifts to heavenly gems. Continuing:

  My crown, indeed! I do not fear the king, attired in this grandeur.

  Please send me gems again – I have a flower. It looks like them, and for its bright resemblance, receive it.

  If Emmons’s gems are his essays or poems, that would explain why Dickinson asks for more. In exchange, she sends him a “flower”—another poem?—and ventures for the first time in her surviving correspondence to speak of her crown: thanks to his encouragement, she feels attired, authorized, to meet “the king,” an obscure figure that may refer to Barrett Browning’s king-poets or the powerful fathers or even Clytie’s Apollo. However we interpret this symbol, Dickinson clearly gives the credit for her boldness to Emmons and to the female predecessor she then proceeds to bring in, quoting the same tercet from “A Vision of Poets” but arranging it as prose: “A pleasant journey to you, both in the pathway home, and in the longer way – Then ‘golden morning’s open flowings, shall sway the trees to murmurous bowings, in metric chant of blessed poems.’” Paralleling Emmons’s journey home with that of the aspiring poet in Barrett Browning, she was declaring her faith in her friend’s artistic future.

  Dickinson was too circumspect to speak of her own future. But it seems clear that her friendship with this young man (who would achieve little) had produced a more solemn understanding of what it was to be a poet—a crystallization in her consciousness of self, now more distinct and singled out than ever. She not only felt more confident in her readiness to meet “the king,” she sounded like Emily Dickinson: imagistic, succinct, enigmatic. Years later, telling Joseph Lyman how she had given up loquacity for concision—a key development for her—she mentioned another gem: “We used to think, Joseph, when I was an unsifted girl and you so scholarly that words were cheap & weak. Now I dont know of anything so mighty. . . . Sometimes I write one, and look at his outlines till he glows as no sapphire.”

  Writing Sue in late August or September, she gave the impression the last few weeks would have been dull and empty if not for Emmons: “There was much that was sweet Commencement week – much too that was dusty, but my bee gathered many drops of the sweetest and purest honey.” It was the same image and idea as in her friend’s proposal for a literary magazine, the bees “silently at work making honey.” Without pausing, she added, “I had many talks with Emmons, which I will not forget, and a charming farewell ride, before he went away – he stayed more than a week after Commencement was done, and came to see me often. . . . I shall miss Emmons very much.”

  Like Ben Newton, this young man—her last close student friend—helped call out the poet in Dickinson and then moved out of the way. The difference between these mentors was that Newton, an imposing older brother and Unitarian, presented her with Emerson’s hard-to-assimilate poems, whereas Emmons, more of an equal and operating within orthodoxy, brought a viable female model. Together, Emmons and Barrett Browning pointed the way to two major discoveries: how to write from wounded affection, and how to aestheticize the aggressive evangelical tradition and in that way hold her own against it. Solitude and pain could be turned into art. As the poet put it some nine years later in the best of her commemorative lyrics on Barrett Browning, “The Dark – felt beautiful” (Fr627).

  Her Amherst Friends Wholly Misinterpret Her

  Contributing to the summer’s tensions and clarifications was a bitter and probably inevitable quarrel with Sue, who for her part went through a breakdown lasting several months.

  Although the Cutlers thought Sue “made [her]self sick” by sewing too much, her own opinion was that a breakdown had been coming on “for a year.” As the self-diagnosis hints, the stresses of her engagement had perhaps made her more anxious and obsessive. There was much to be uneasy about: her dependency on the Cutlers, the possessiveness of Austin’s and Emily’s love, her fiancé’s religious doubts, his “man’s requirements,” and now the need to set a wedding day. Collapsing and taking to her bed, Sue was cared for by a professional nurse and by relations and friends, including Emily, who described her in late July as “suffering much within the last few weeks, from a Nervous Fever.” Then, on August 4, two days before the bustle of Commencement week, she was “hurried” out of town by her sister Harriet. A month later she spoke of “weakness in my back” and suspected her hair would fall out. “For pity’s sake,” she wrote Ned Hitchcock, “don’t get nervous.” Only after six months’ rest with maternal relatives in New York and Michigan was she able to go back to Amherst.

  This illness brought out Sue’s conscientious and censorious sides in high relief. On August 13, she began an epistle by first squaring matters with her high principles: “I never write letters Sabbath night, but it is quite allowable in the present instance I am sure.” In December, learning that Mary Bartlett had given birth to a daughter two months earlier, she bristled with asperity and hauteur:

  Great business, I think, to have a feminine accession to the family at the Parsonage and not apprise Aunt Sue personally—I have half a mind not to write you a word and forswear all love for the very juvenile Miss—If I was a witch I do believe I’d glide through the keyhole this minute and pinch her nose with my invisible fingers, for her Mother’s misdemeanors—bad woman—I stood aghast with astonishment, when Jul
ius informed me.

  Sue could be extremely resourceful in making others squirm for their lapses. Here, she sounds exactly like the vengeful fairy godmother overlooked at the christening.

  The reason the quarrel between Sue and Emily has been poorly understood is that the poet’s two letters speaking of it have been dated after Sue’s removal from Amherst and then placed in reverse order. In all likelihood, the earlier of the two, which begins “Sue – you can go or stay,” was written shortly before her departure for Geneva. “We differ often lately,” Emily continued, “and this must be the last.” A few years earlier, explaining her cooling friendship with Abby Wood, Emily had written: “we take different views of life – our thoughts would not dwell together.” Now, losing patience after a series of arguments, she declares the relationship has reached a crisis and that the next step is up to Sue, who should have no illusions as to the writer’s dependency: “You need not fear to leave me lest I should be alone, for I often part with things I fancy I have loved, – sometimes to the grave, and sometimes to an oblivion rather bitterer than death.” She marks the rupture by returning an unnamed token of friendship: “It is the lingering emblem of the Heaven I once dreamed, and though if this is taken, I shall remain alone, and though in that last day, the Jesus Christ you love, remark he does not know me – there is a darker spirit will not disown its child.”