My Wars Are Laid Away in Books

by Alfred Habegger

  Still – Clad in your Mail of ices –

  Thigh of Granite – and thew – of Steel –

  Heedless – alike – of pomp – or parting

  Ah, Teneriffe!

  I’m kneeling – still –

  Fr752A

  A classic treatment of haughty unresponsiveness versus humble, admiring, undying love, this poem wasn’t sent to anyone but Sue.

  In subject matter, the verse sent next door in this period continued to deal with sunsets, the seasons, the future, immortality, and so forth. But the most frequent theme, a new one, was the independent or autonomous soul, the focus of at least nine poems Sue received in 1863–1865. Many of these are marked by the gnomic astringency that was becoming more salient in Dickinson’s work. One begins, “Reverse cannot befall that fine Prosperity/Whose sources are interior” (Fr565[A]). In other poems also, the opening couplet tells the basic story: “The Soul’s Superior instants/Occur to Her – alone” (Fr630A); “there is a June when Corn is cut,/whose option is within” (Fr811A). *128 At times this ideal self-containment suggests that ordinary social contact is a diversion that may be dispensed with:

  The Soul that hath a Guest

  Doth seldom go abroad –

  Diviner Crowd at Home –

  Obliterate the need – . . .

  Fr592A

  Like Sue, the poet was, in addition to being many warmer things, a cold and majestic Teneriffe. She had to be (of course) to create an original and independent oeuvre.

  If Dickinson’s many poems on autonomy are somewhere near the center of her work, the most revealing may be those that reflect on the history of her self-reliance. One of these traces her tough self-containment back to the fearful hopes she used to entertain:

  When I hoped, I feared –

  Since I hoped I dared

  Everywhere alone

  As a church remain –

  Spectre cannot harm

  Serpent cannot charm

  He is Prince of Harm

  Who hath suffered him –

  Fr594B

  “Since I hoped” seems to mean “since I ceased hoping.” Like a magic rune devised to neutralize “Harm,” these lines have the flavor of a wizard’s hermetic immunity. More impressive, however, is a poem from 1864 that proudly tells how the speaker overcame her troubles precisely by cultivating them:

  On the Bleakness of my Lot

  Bloom I strove to raise –

  Late – My Garden of a Rock

  Yielded Grape – and Maise –

  Soil of Flint, if steady tilled

  Will refund the Hand –

  Seed of Palm, by Lybian Sun

  Fructified in Sand –

  Fr862B

  The desert imagery, perfectly appropriate, reveals Dickinson’s awareness that her poetic flowers could not have been cultivated in the domestic plots worked by happily married women. Only the more impersonal second stanza was sent to Sue.

  Another crop-growing poem speaks both of what she hoarded and what she sent others:

  The Products of my Farm are these

  Sufficient for my Own

  And here and there a Benefit

  Unto a Neighbor’s Bin . . .

  Fr1036

  The implication (and these lines were also not sent to Sue) is that Dickinson’s ultimate purpose in writing was something other than communication.

  A poem that was dispatched next door sketches a dismissive picture of flutteringly responsive female gossip:

  The Leaves like Women interchange

  Exclusive Confidence –

  Somewhat of nods and somewhat

  Portentous inference –

  The Parties in both cases

  Enjoining secrecy –

  Inviolable compact

  To notoriety.

  Fr1098A

  About 1865 Sue was trusted with a version of the poem unwisely confided to Samuel, “Title divine is mine,” whose speaker calls herself “The Wife without the Sign” and toys with the phrase “‘My Husband’” (Fr194B). (In that case, one notes, it was a man who couldn’t keep the secret.) The gift implies a high degree of trust in Sue’s discretion and raises the important question whether the sisters-in-law discussed the poem’s private meaning.

  In 1924, a decade after Sue’s death, her daughter Martha Bianchi published the sensational claim that Aunt Emily had “met [her] fate” on a visit to Philadelphia, where she and a married man fell in love but agreed to renounce one another. The story was supposedly imparted as “a confidence to her Sister Sue,” who “sacredly guarded [it] . . . till death.” These melodramatic disclosures were met with so much skepticism and outright scorn that Bianchi was driven to amplify them in 1932. Now it appeared the man had been a clergyman and that many others besides Sue were possessed of the story—Austin, Vinnie, Martha Gilbert Smith, an Amherst College trustee’s wife, and various relatives. What this list of informants chiefly reveals is that Dickinson’s family shared a secret understanding about her, confided no doubt with the “nod” she understood so well. Martha’s story is too heavily salted with “portentous inference” to be swallowed whole, yet she was close enough to her mother that there could have been a factual basis. The trouble with rumor is that it can have a grain of truth.

  How the Mountain Rose

  If the more than six hundred poems that Dickinson wrote in 1863, 1864, and 1865 are read against those of 1861 (an experiment made possible by the new variorum edition’s refined dating), certain directional tendencies stand out with such clarity it is unlikely her work can ever again be seen as somehow not developing—not building on her experience. Proportionally, we find an increase in the number of poems on abstract themes and a corresponding decrease in the number of first-person narratives (though she of course continued to produce these). The voicing of present, extreme, and exclamatory feeling—“the drop of anguish/That scalds me now” (Fr215)—more or less disappears, its place being taken by a story line in which the speaker gives a respectful account of what she has achieved. These various developments are beautifully summed up by the poem, “Further in summer than the birds” (Fr895), in which the restful drone of stasis succeeds clamorous anticipation.

  Of course, many things did not change. In a poem from 1863—“Alter! When the hills do” (Fr755B)—the speaker indignantly denies she could possibly be unfaithful to the man she loves. Sending the first stanza to Sue, Dickinson withheld the second, whose “Sir” identifies the imagined recipient’s sex. In another poem that would dispel her lover’s doubts of her constancy, she imagines the river of death rising to her feet, breast, and mouth, and last of all her “searching eyes,” which, to the very end, remain “quick – with Thee!” (Fr631). “Quick” has all its meanings here, “fast,” “darting,” “energetic,” “pregnant,” all focused on the second-person singular pronoun toward which the bravura ending builds. The point the poem makes seems valid: the poet’s eyes were fixed on her lover, whose remote and perpetually retouched image helped direct her huge energies. His face played a role in her artistic life similar to the idea of heaven, being the perfect but absent good that spurred her to rise above an enslaving reality. The secretly cherished “relationship” was the fantasy that helped her devise a very real and powerful freedom. *129

  A poem from 1865 in which Dickinson offers to sacrifice herself as proof of her devotion to her “Sceptic Thomas” (the doubting Disciple) touches on her inexhaustible fertility:

  Split the Lark – and you’ll find the Music –

  Bulb after Bulb, in Silver rolled –

  Scantily dealt to the Summer Morning

  Saved for your Ear, when Lutes be old – . . .

  Fr905

  Eager to demonstrate her truth, Emily-the-lark, the ultimate female, imagines her disbelieving lover splitting open her heart and there beholding her countless lyrics in the form of immature bulbs. These, the eggs of poems, would have been his alone if he hadn’t killed his bird to prove her loyalty. “Bulb afte
r Bulb, in Silver rolled”: was she thinking of the manuscript books she “[s]cantily dealt” to others’ eyes, a single poem at a time, often only a stanza? Was there a dream of “saving” everything for a select pair of ears?

  Like her father, who isolated himself by his loyalty to Whig federalism, Emily was evidently bent on playing out the heart’s unswerving pledges. Poem after poem looks forward to a final reunion with the unseen lover: “Fitter to see him I may be” (Fr834), “Each scar I’ll keep for him” (Fr920), “My worthiness is all my doubt” (Fr791). In the last of these, what chiefly weighs on the speaker’s “thronging Mind” is the fear she might be inadequate for “His beloved Need.” Playing a sustaining role in her personal and poetry-writing economy, the anticipated reunion becomes, as one poem concedes, an addictive drug:

  The Stimulus, beyond the Grave

  His Countenance to see

  Supports me like imperial Drams

  Afforded Day by Day.

  Fr1001

  Another poem’s speaker says she has nothing to do pending the last reunion but “sing”—the one activity that overcomes present darkness and approximates future “telling”:

  I sing to use the Waiting,

  My Bonnet but to tie

  And shut the Door unto my House

  No more to do have I

  Till His best step approaching

  We journey to the Day

  And tell each other how We sung

  To keep the Dark away.

  Fr955

  None of her post-1855 messages to Sue anticipate such a scene.

  A necessary aspect of these poems (here we observe the same rule as in those sent Sue) is her separation from the man. This distance is sometimes intangible, as in “I had not minded walls” (1863), where the speaker says that mere physical barriers could not have deterred her. Even if the universe were one solid rock and she “heard his silver Call” on the opposite side (as Jane heard Rochester), she would tunnel through, but as things stand she is stopped by “A filament – a law” (Fr554). In many poems written after 1862, however, the distance seems as much spatial as anything. In “I’ve none to tell me to but thee,” the speaker, addressing one who has moved “Beyond my Boundary,” imagines how she would react if their situations were reversed and she had “ebbed” from him “On some unanswering Shore” (Fr929). In “The spry arms of the wind,” she wishes she could be blown to “an adjoining Zone” to perform a brief errand:

  To ascertain the House

  And if the soul’s within

  And hold the Wick of mine to it

  To light, and then return –

  Fr802

  That is, she would like to locate the faraway person, verify he is still alive, and by this brief contact relight her benighted spirit.

  Another charged poem considers two widely separated persons who are united only by the same daily cycle of light and dark:

  The Noon unwinds Her Blue

  Till One Breadth cover Two –

  Remotest – still – . . .

  The Midnight’s Dusky Arms

  Clasp Hemispheres, and Homes

  And so

  Opon her Bosom – One

  And One opon Her Hem –

  Both lie –

  Fr765

  The two people are not merely apart but “Remotest.” One sleeps on the bosom and the other on the hem, meaning perhaps that when it is midnight for one it is dusk or dawn for the other, or that they sleep within the continent and on its edge respectively, or that one lies in the heart of passion and the other . . . doesn’t. The poem’s eroticism lies in its wistfully compensatory effort to pull one huge hemispheric cover over two widely parted bodies.

  Another poem, whose coyly postponed last word identifies the recipient’s gender, opens with the decisive statement that “Where Thou art – that – is Home – /Cashmere – or Calvary – the same.” Cashmere is soft pleasure, Calvary torture, yet they would be equally welcome if the speaker could only be with the man. As it is, their relationship is one of absence and negatives, dooming her to a kind of hell:

  Where Thou art not – is Wo –

  Tho’ Bands of Spices – row –

  What Thou dost not – Despair –

  Tho’ Gabriel – praise me – Sir –

  Fr749

  Although the last line hints at Dickinson’s satisfying awareness of her achievement as an artist, the realization does not allay her despair, or so the speaker says.

  A poem entered in the manuscript books in fall 1862, “I envy seas whereon he rides,” is, like others cited here, consistent with the facts of Wadsworth’s trip to San Francisco. The speaker envies all the objects associated with his journey and new home—sparrows nesting under the eaves, flies on windowpanes. Wishing she could “be Noon to Him,” she ends by acknowledging the interdiction of her desire, on pain of punishment—

  Lest noon in everlasting night –

  Drop Gabriel – and me –

  Fr368

  Generally, as in the preceding poem, the archangel Gabriel is beyond the ravages of fortune. Here, perhaps identified with Wadsworth (on account of religious function and magnificent voice), he is as much at risk as Dickinson.

  A closely related poem was recorded in the manuscript books about a year after the minister’s move west. Largely ignored by critics and biographers, it merits quoting in its entirety:

  I could die – to know –

  ’Tis a trifling knowledge –

  News-Boys salute the Door –

  Carts – joggle by –

  Morning’s bold face – stares in the window –

  Were but mine – the Charter of the least Fly –

  Houses hunch the House

  With their Brick shoulders –

  Coals – from a Rolling Load – rattle – how – near –

  To the very Square – His foot is passing –

  Possibly, this moment –

  While I – dream – Here –

  Fr537

  The door, the window, the house: at the focus of this reverie stands the man’s supposed domicile. Dickinson conjures up an ordinary city scene with newsboys, traffic, closely built brick houses, and a load of coal noisily rolling down on the pavement just as he, or rather his foot, passes. In her huge lyric oeuvre, this seems to be the one approximation of what was not yet known as realism, the vivid evocation of a gritty workaday scene. Introduced as “trifling,” the well-drawn picture captures the urban chaos, uses the dumped load of coal to bring eye and ear down to street level in preparation for that approaching foot, then frames the whole by returning to the poet’s act of imagining, now felt as remote and idle: “While I – dream – Here”—“Here” also being the page itself. With surprising ease, she carries off a kind of writing not in her usual line.

  More characteristically, she continued to write about extreme states: mental anguish, despair, the self as bomb or volcano, the fear that one may be coming apart. No other American writer of her time explored with equal sensitivity and mastery the experience of fragmentation. “I felt a cleaving in my mind” (Fr867), “Finding is the first act” (Fr910), and “Crumbling is not an instant’s act” (Fr1010) are among the poems describing from varying angles the ego’s unraveling. Significantly, these works were composed in a period, not of collapse, but reconstruction.

  An affiliated group attends to the way the mind protects itself by means of a selective inattention:

  There is a pain – so utter –

  It swallows substance up –

  Then covers the Abyss with Trance –

  So Memory can step

  Around – across – opon it –

  As One within a Swoon –

  Goes safely – where an open eye –

  Would drop Him – Bone by Bone –

  Fr515

  Based on the conventional idea of the sleepwalker’s instinctive avoidance of danger, the poem proposes that our minds shield our disasters and abysses from us so that we
can successfully negotiate them, stepping around, across, and eventually on. The beautiful tentativeness of movement captures both the indirectness and persistence of Dickinson’s creative act, always devising a way to function and always returning to essential troubles. The poem elucidates her answer to Higginson’s charge that her gait was “spasmodic”: “I am in danger – Sir.” Yet her danger is not what we should remember so much as her hard-won balance.

  In early 1865, looking back at her path, she wrote:

  I stepped from Plank to Plank

  A slow and cautious way

  The Stars about my Head I felt

  About my Feet the Sea –

  I knew not but the next

  Would be my final inch –

  This gave me that precarious Gait

  Some call Experience –

  Fr926

  These lines exemplify a type of first-person retrospection that became more frequent as the North gradually prevailed in the Civil War: the proud declaration that the speaker has fought through. The essential story in this group is that she has survived starvation, shipwreck, and imprisonment, including the prison of innocence. One of the most suggestive of these dramatizations, “Let us play yesterday,” tells how, thanks to her lover, she escaped her prolonged and tormenting girlhood. Like a hatchling chick who wouldn’t leave its shell, she had dreamed there must be more to life yet persisted in trying to satisfy her yearnings with her “Lexicon.” Then her tutor/lover cracked her isolation:

  Still at the Egg-life –

  Chafing the Shell –

  When you troubled the Ellipse –

  And the Bird fell –

  Fr754

  Having experienced the sky, the speaker now knows how painful it would be to “resume the Shell” and hopes her liberty won’t be taken from her.