Yet if she could learn to be a singer, to whom would she sing? Audience is one of the great mysteries vexing Dickinson scholars, who variously infer that she devised an alternative form of publication by addressing herself mainly to family and select friends. But readers then and now also feel that she speaks to them alone; her verse is intimate, private. Higginson would classify it with what Emerson called the poetry of the portfolio, something produced without thought of publication, solely to express the writer’s own mind. But this is only partly true and reflects more of Higginson’s prejudice than Dickinson’s intention. For she spoke of her writing with increasing if comically humble confidence, hesitancy growing to assertion:
My Splendors, are Menagerie—
But their Competeless Show
Will entertain the Centuries
When I, am long ago,
An Island in dishonored Grass—
Whom none but Daisies, know—
Deliberately she defied the conventional, the sentimental, the predictable: birds gossip, roads wrinkle, suns stoop, skies pout, and daffodils untie their bonnets. Emotionally raw and intellectually dense, her poems divide nouns from verbs, past from present (“When I, am long ago, / An Island in dishonored Grass—”), only to reunite them. Ditto pronouns: they lose case or reference and yet stay what they are. Fantastically, she transforms life and death, speaking after death (“Because I could not stop for Death—”) or at the moment of its onset (“I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—”), and in many poems, with color and delight she embraces sensually the things of this world (“We like March—his Shoes are Purple—”), the change of seasons and their recurrence, as in this early example:
An altered look about the hills—
A Tyrian light the village fills—
A wider sunrise in the morn—
A deeper twilight on the lawn—
A print of a vermillion foot—
A purple finger on the slope—
A flippant fly opon the pane—
A spider at his trade again—
An added strut in Chanticleer—
A flower expected everywhere—
An axe shrill singing in the woods—
Fern odors on untravelled roads—
All this and more I cannot tell—
A furtive look you know as well—
And Nicodemus’ Mystery
Receives it’s annual reply!
She can tilt her rhyme; she’ll use an off rhyme or an eye rhyme: “Power is only Pain—/ Stranded—thro’ Discipline.” She shuns full stops: “First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go—.” The open-ended dash, breathless, was her pause of choice, dashes in all sizes and shapes: short, long, slant, each prying the door ajar. Nouns stand at attention, capitalized and substantive. “Narcotics cannot still the Tooth / ,” she writes, “That nibbles at the soul—.”
Invoking the Bible, blaspheming, misquoting, and subverting the expected, she tests the idea of God, rails at his distance. She suffers, she sees; she suffers because she sees:
I had some things that I called mine—
And God, that he called his—
Till recently a rival claim
Disturbed these amities.
The property, my garden,
Which having sown with care—
He claims the pretty acre—
And sends a Bailiff there.
“On subjects of which we know nothing,” she once said, “we both believe, and disbelieve a hundred times an Hour, which keeps Believing nimble.”
Some things that fly there be—
Birds—Hours—the Bumblebee—
Of these no Elegy.
Some things that stay there be—
Grief—Hills—Eternity—
Nor this behooveth me.
There are that resting, rise.
Can I expound the skies?
How still the Riddle lies!
“Can I expound the skies?” If not, why not? Though church doctrine might annoy her, she never tires of its human side: “When Jesus tells us about his Father, we distrust him. When he shows us his Home, we turn away, but when he confides to us that he is ‘acquainted with Grief,’ we listen,” she says, “for that also is an Acquaintance of our own.” Sorrow touches sorrow, offering the comfort of the unknown: “This World is not conclusion.” Like her poetry, the wounded deer leaps highest. (“I sing,” as she had told Higginson, “as the Boy does by the Burying Ground—because I am afraid.”) A poet of incalculable loss, infinite compassion, she speaks urgently, intimately, frugally, of the unspeakable. The space between us and her melts away.
She employs the common folk measure of Protestant hymns, writing in six-and eight-syllable lines, in order to unbalance it—no full stops at the end of a stanza, for instance. A miniaturist, she composes poems in brief, most of which fit on a single page. She loves shortcuts. She manages—invents—an economic phrase to express the inexpressible, raiding the unspeakable, cutting to the quick of emotion, all emotion, and dissecting it with such speed we wonder how she can possibly know what she knows:
She dealt her pretty words like Blades—
How glittering they shone—
And every One unbared a Nerve
Or wantoned with a Bone—
She never deemed—she hurt—
That—is not Steel’s Affair—
A vulgar grimace in the Flesh—
How ill the Creatures bear—
To Ache is human—not polite—
The Film opon the eye
Mortality’s old Custom—
Just locking up—to Die—
The succinct description of Hawthorne she would later send Higginson—he “appalls, entices”—refers equally to herself. Her pretty words, too, are dealt like blades:
Title divine—is mine!
The Wife—without the Sign!
Acute Degree—conferred on me—
Empress of Calvary!
Royal—all but the Crown!
Betrothed—without the swoon
God sends us Women—
Incomparably modern, the poetry is as ephemeral as experience itself. Sensual, its decided sexuality—whether directed toward the Master or Susan or Higginson or her own vocation as poet—is expressed in a language compounded of colloquialism and religious reference, aphorism and plaint, statement and plea. Direct, dense, often excruciating, her poetry lies close to the reader and one step beyond, fervently waiting: Because I could not stop.
DICKINSON DISPATCHED POEMS TO FRIENDS, her verse often accompanied by a pressed flower or a leaf. A large number went to Samuel Bowles, the close friend of Susan and Austin’s (later it was rumored that Bowles and Susan were uncommonly fond of each other), who visited Amherst often, sometimes with his wife, sometimes not. Owner and editor of the influential Springfield Republican, a conservative weekly newspaper founded by his father in 1824, Bowles converted it into a daily, working until he collapsed and then diving back into his work as soon as he recovered. But he managed to produce a newspaper respected nationally for its clarity, its pith, its independence, and its editorials. The Dickinsons were enthusiastic readers.
Liberal, generous, unhappily married, and reputed to be something of a roué as well as a supporter of women writers—his paper often printed their poetry—Bowles was also a dabbler in national as well as local politics, a diplomat, and a dynamo with real sensitivity and beautiful, seductive eyes, a modern man impatient, canny, and worldly. “His growth was by absorption,” said his biographer. “Other people were to him sponges out of which he deftly squeezed whatever knowledge they could yield.” His journalistic ear sleeplessly cocked, his politics fresh, his sentiments broad, his pen ready, he was an antislavery man who considered abolitionists to be dangerous extremists. (Most did.) He applauded Edward Dickinson’s stand against the Kansas-Nebraska bill and supported the congressman’s unsuccessful bid for reelection in 1854 (though it seems he eventually withdrew his support). In 1856 he supported the ant
islavery Republican John C. Frémont for the presidency, then in 1860 endorsed the rail-splitter Abraham Lincoln, whom he didn’t much like, and reluctantly supported the war, which he liked even less.
Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield Republican. “His nature was Future.”
Radicals like Higginson found the Republican too pessimistic for their taste, and Boston salonistas like Annie Adams Fields airily dismissed its publisher: “Mr. Bowles is quite handsome and would be altogether if he had elegance of manner to correspond with what nature has done for him in giving him fine eyes,” the Brahmin hostess recorded, “but he is an ambitious man, ambitious to be known as a literary man, but apparently mistaking popularity for fame he has learned to know almost everybody of literary celebrity, to get on the top word continually, to keep open house, to be a general good fellow, which combined with real ability has made him widely liked & given him a brilliant restless way, which makes so many Americans.” James Fields, her husband, took Bowles’s measure more crisply: heaven forbid the man should start a magazine; it would bury The Atlantic.
“His nature was Future”: Emily Dickinson grasped him best. But the future was something he never quite reached. A series of ailments, including sciatica and shingles, along with his chronic insomnia and his headaches, all wore him down, and in 1862 he sailed for Europe to rest. When he returned, he picked up exactly where he had left off. The work and the illnesses continued, and he died sixteen years later, at the age of fifty-one.
As early as 1860, Bowles and his wife, Mary, were Dickinson staples. It was Mary who gave Emily an antislavery Christmas parable by Theodore Parker, but it was Samuel, with his “vivid Face and the besetting Accents,” with whom the poet shared a special conversation, he ribbing her as “the Queen Recluse” who “has ‘overcome the world.’” Bowles appreciated and respected Dickinson’s need for solitude. “I have been in a savage, turbulent state for some time—,” he confided to Austin, “indulging in a sort of chronic disgust at everything & everybody—I guess a good deal as Emily feels.”
Emily trafficked with no movement, no group, no cabal of dogooders outside the select circle that now included Bowles, with whom she could disagree, particularly about politics. “I am much ashamed Mr. Bowles,” she jauntily apologized after one of his visits. “I misbehaved tonight. I would like to sit in the dust. I fear I am your little friend no more, but Mrs Jim Crow.” The issue seems to have been women’s rights. “I am sorry I smiled at women,” she continued. “Indeed, I revere holy ones, like Mrs Fry and Miss Nightingale.” She and Bowles treated each other as equals, and when he left for Europe, she deeply missed him. “When the Best is gone—I know that other things are not of consequence—,” she explained to his wife. “The Heart wants what it wants—or else it does not care—.”
Vinnie once observed that her sister was “always watching for the rewarding person to come.” Bowles was one such person.
“I AM SO FAR FROM LAND,” Dickinson once told Bowles. One wonders if, this time, he understood her meaning, and it seems he did. She asked him to mail some letters she did not want to post from the gossipy village of Amherst; he could be trusted to be discreet. And if he did not thoroughly understand her poems—his taste in verse hugged the shore—he published several in the Republican when his wife or Sue gave them to him: “Nobody knows this little Rose” in 1858, “I taste a liquor never brewed” in the spring of 1861; and on March 1, 1862, “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers.”
That last poem was one of the four that Dickinson chose to mail Higginson just six weeks after it had appeared the Republican. There it stood, anonymous but hers, in one of the best papers of the day. Pride of publication had nudged the door a bit more ajar, and behind it lay her query to Higginson, another special person: Is my Verse alive?
Of course she knew the answer. That was not the point.
FIVE
Thomas Wentworth Higginson: Liberty Is Aggressive
Come strong.” In the drizzly spring of 1854, three years after the aborted Sims rescue, Higginson received the call from the abolitionist Samuel May Jr., Louisa May Alcott’s cousin. Come to Boston right away.
Anthony Burns, a twenty-year-old fugitive slave from Virginia, had been arrested—kidnapped, roared the Boston Vigilance Committee—and imprisoned in the same Court House that had confined the luckless Sims.
Burns had already declined the legal counsel of such patrician notables as Richard Henry Dana, for even if the abolitionists of Boston dreamed otherwise, Burns, no fool, knew where all the commotion was headed. “It is of no use,” he told Dana. “They will swear to me & get me back; and if they do, I shall fare worse if I resist.” Also aware that a legal wrangle would just delay but not prevent Burns’s reenslavement, the Vigilance Committee called for a public meeting at Faneuil Hall on Friday evening, May 26, and asked Higginson, if he could, to bring a posse of Worcester men.
“Give all the notice you can,” May had said. What he actually intended—beyond rallying public support—is unclear.
Himself prepared for battle, Higginson stepped off the train in Boston that Friday to find his fellow committee members squabbling over how best to proceed, their debate droning on until one of them, learning the slave catchers were to pass by, suggested they march outdoors and “point the finger of scorn.” The finger of scorn? Higginson’s mouth fell open. “As if Southern slave-catchers were to be combated by such weapons,” he wailed in frustration.
While the committee dithered into the late afternoon, Higginson broke away and bought a dozen hand axes. Martin Stowell, a friend from Worcester, had told him that Burns might be sprung from the Court House that same night if the abolitionist leaders could channel the anger sure to be unleashed at the rally. Someone could yell that a mob of black men was at the Court House trying to free Burns, Stowell continued, and the Faneuil Hall crowd would then surge into Court Square, where Higginson would be waiting, ready to pilot the freedom lovers toward the jail and Burns’s liberation.
It was a grand plan, bold and dangerous and so enticing that Higginson never stopped to consider its practicality: that it might be impossible, for instance, to alert the leaders of the rally to the details of the plot in the din of a roaring crowd, nearly five hundred strong (mostly men), that crushed into Faneuil Hall that night. And so the silky-tongued orator Wendell Phillips, key member of the Vigilance Committee, never heard of the scheme, and it’s not clear whether the other speakers, Samuel Gridley Howe and Theodore Parker, really understood it even if they had.
Higginson had no choice but to saunter back over to Court Square, where Stowell had stashed the axes, and affect nonchalance.
“I am a clergyman and a man of peace,” Theodore Parker’s voice meantime rang out in the packed and steamy hall. “I love peace. But there is a means, and there is an end; Liberty is the end, and sometimes peace is not the means towards it.” Still, the crowd should reconvene the next morning, he continued, for a nonviolent protest against the kidnapping. Wendell Phillips was ready to assent when someone screamed out that a group of black men were at the Court House rescuing Burns that very moment. Pandemonium. From Court Square, Higginson spied in horror a group of men hurrying up State Street: the “froth and scum of the meeting, the fringe of idlers on its edge,” he later described them, and not the men or at least not the hundreds he had expected.
Posted near the Court House, Stowell began to hammer its heavy oak door with one of the axes. Several men threw bricks. Several other men—Higginson at the front—hoisted a fourteen-foot wooden beam. Someone inside began ringing the Court House bell. The men with the battering ram shoved forward; one of the door’s hinges tore; the door tipped to the side. Higginson, at the head of the beam, elbowed his way into the room, but Lewis Hayden pressed ahead of him. Unarmed, Higginson fought bare-handed. The police were swinging swords and billy clubs, and Higginson received a cut, nothing severe, on his chin. Hayden fired his revolver. Stowell fired his. Perhaps the guards did too. For many years afte
rward Higginson supposed, or wanted to believe, the sheriff’s deputies would carelessly or drunkenly murder their own.
One man was killed. Special officer James Batchelder, a twenty-four-year-old teamster stationed behind the teetering door, fell backward, moaning “I am stabbed.”
Higginson didn’t hear Batchelder’s cry. Beaten back by the guards, he ran down the passageway and onto the Court House steps, where he saw that the sullen mob was dispersing. “You cowards, will you desert us now?” he shouted. For a moment the crowd didn’t move. But it was over. “That meeting at Faneuil Hall was tremendous, I never saw such enthusiasm,” Higginson later told a friend, “& (though warned that it would be so) I could not possibly believe that it wd exhale so idly as it did in Court Square.”
Just then Bronson Alcott strode up the Court House steps, cane in hand, and paused to ask Higginson why he and his men were not inside. “Because these people will not stand by us,” Higginson growled. Alcott continued up the steps, a model of transcendental courage. Another pistol shot rang out. Alcott walked back down the stairs.
With the approval of President Franklin Pierce, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s benefactor, the United States marshall in Boston called out federal troops. “The law must be executed,” he declared.
Later that night Batchelder died. No one was ever quite sure what had happened, whether Hayden or Stowell had fired the deadly shot, if in fact it was a shot that had killed Batchelder and not a wound from a saber. Unaware of this, Higginson spent the night at a friend’s and, lest he be recognized by the police the next day, tied a kerchief around his face when he ventured out. He again met with the Vigilance Committee, but since legal proceedings were now inevitable, there was nothing left for him to do but go back to Worcester on Monday, consoling himself that the rescue’s failure would provoke outrage among waffling antislavery people. And it did. “We went to bed one night old fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whig,” said the textile manufacturer Amos Adams Lawrence, “& waked up stark mad Abolitionists.”
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