There is the poetry of raw emotional experience, demanding ruthless gerunds to describe it: “I felt a Cleaving in my Mind—.” Parts of speech, for her, unlock the world: “Breaking in bright Orthography / On my simple sleep—/ Thundering it’s Prospective—/ Till I stir, and weep—.” She sang of extremes and fused them while keeping them distinct—light and dark, frailty and force, silence and noise blazing in gold and quenching in purple. Hers is also a poetry of mood, of change and doubt and temporary rapprochement. Art is all. Is it enough? Possibly:
The Martyr Poets—did not tell—
But wrought their Pang in syllable—
That when their mortal name be numb—
Their mortal fate—encourage Some—
DICKINSON IS ALSO A POET OF LOSS. “‘We take no note of Time, but from its loss,’” Dickinson (like her father) quoted Edward Young’s poem “Night Thoughts.” And if hyperbolic, she was also deadly earnest; even at the young age of fifteen, she lived in retrospect. Time was fleeting, yes, and a robber too. “I often part with things I fancy I have loved,—sometimes to the grave, and sometimes to an oblivion rather bitterer that [than] death—,” she would tell Sue on the occasion of Sue’s visit to family in Michigan. “Thus my heart bleeds so frequently that I shant mind the hemorrhage.”
“Of nearness to her sundered Things / The Soul has special times—,” she wrote circa 1862 in a poem of reversal that anticipates Gerard Manley Hopkins.
….….
Bright Knots of Apparitions
Salute us, with their wings—
As we—it were—that perished—
Themself—had just remained till we rejoin them—
And ’twas they, and not ourself
That mourned—
Again, a few years later: “A loss of something ever felt I—/ The first that I could recollect / Bereft I was—of what I knew not / Too young that any should suspect.” Loss, as subject, helped her outline the painful but perhaps necessary distances that separate us, person from person and person from nature. “A Light exists in Spring,” she writes, probably in 1865,
Not present on the Year
At any other period—
When March is scarcely here
A Color stands abroad
On Solitary Fields
That Science cannot overtake
But Human Nature feels.
It waits opon the Lawn,
It shows the furthest Tree
Opon the furthest Slope you know
It almost speaks to you.
Then as Horizons step
Or Noons report away
Without the Formula of sound
It passes and we stay—
A quality of loss
Affecting our Content
As Trade had suddenly encroached
Opon a Sacrament—
Loss, true. But March is her season (“Dear March—Come in—”), a time of transition and renewed hope. For even when the light of spring passes and we stay, the poet produces a vision “That Science cannot overtake / But Human Nature feels.” It almost speaks to you, as she does, without the derivative and predictable “Formula” of conventional verse—or narrative. And it happens in an instant; it’s an experience much like that of reading her poems.
Higginson felt this, and she had told him as much when she enclosed this poem in her first letter, postmarked April 15, 1862:
The nearest Dream recedes—unrealized—
The Heaven we chase—
Like the June Bee—before the School Boy—
Invites the Race—
Stoops—to an easy Clover—
Dips—evades—teazes—deploys—
Then—to the Royal Clouds
Lifts his light Pinnace—
Heedless of the Boy—
Staring—bewildered—at the mocking sky—
Homesick for steadfast Honey—
Ah—the Bee flies not
That brews that rare variety!
As the bee is to the boy, the distant “Heaven we chase” tempts, tantalizes, and finally evades us, and we, yearning for “steadfast Honey,” never quite attain the things—that paradise of perfection—we most desire (“the nearest Dream recedes—unrealized—”). Yet this is not a poem of despair—far from it, for the poet does in fact “realize” a dream, encapsulating it in a language that calls, dips, and flees from us—true—but that leaves us less alone, less aggrieved, less bereft than we were.
Higginson considered this poem one of her most exquisite.
LOSS: WE KNOW THE QUEST is futile but nonetheless rake over Dickinson’s life, hunting for the concrete experiences that might account for her obsession with it, particularly during her most prolific years. Had the birth of Sue and Austin’s son Edward (Ned) in 1861 stolen Sue’s attention; had the imminent departure of the Reverend Charles Wadsworth for a ministerial post in San Francisco scalded the poet’s heart? Is that why she told Higginson, much later, that his friendship had rescued her? Or was she thinking solely of her poems when she approached him, grateful that he responded as he did?
Or was it the war? Certainly the world outside the Homestead was besieged by narrative: each day villagers listened at the telegraph office for the ominous clicks and scanned the newspapers for names of the wounded and dead. “Sorrow seems more general than it did and not the estate of a few persons, since the war began,” Dickinson sadly observed. “They dropped like Flakes—,” she wrote in a poem Higginson later called “The Battle-Field.”
They dropped like Flakes—
They dropped like stars—
Like Petals from a Rose—
When suddenly across the June
A Wind with fingers—goes—
They perished in the seamless Grass—
No eye could find the place—
But God can summon every face
On his Repealless—List.
Men disappear into a vast indifference of “seamless Grass”—wonderful image, all the more striking because grass typically reassures; here it cannot. It does not. Frazar Stearns, the twenty-one-year-old son of the Amherst College president, was killed at the Battle of New Bern in North Carolina in March 1862. He had murmured, “My God,” Dickinson said, and asked for water twice before he died, “his big heart, shot away by a ‘minie ball.’”
“Nobody here could look on Frazar—,” she reported to her cousins, “not even his father.” The casket, drenched in spring flowers, was uncharacteristically closed, and Austin was devastated, as Emily wrote Samuel Bowles, “says—his Brain keeps saying over ‘Frazar is killed’—‘Frazer is killed,’ just as Father told it—to Him. Two or three words of lead—that dropped so deep, they keep weighing—.”
Words of lead: “This is the Hour of Lead—/ Remembered, if outlived, / As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow—/ First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go—.” Is the letting go resignation? A deathlike capitulation to despair? In either case, as Hawthorne bleakly wrote in the July 1862 Atlantic, “there is no remoteness of life and thought, no hermetically sealed seclusion, except, possibly, that of the grave, into which the disturbing influences of this war do not penetrate.” Yet Higginson was counseling the long view in his “Letter to a Young Contributor,” published three months earlier and just as the awful Battle of Shiloh had left twenty thousand casualties in its wake. Remember literature, Higginson wrote: “General Wolfe, on the eve of battle, said of Gray’s ‘Elegy,’ ‘Gentlemen, I would rather have written that poem than have taken Quebec.’”
Little wonder that he snagged her attention. Of course she could not know, as he then did not, that his withdrawal from the field of action was not unqualified and never could be.
But neither was hers. “I’m sorry for the Dead—Today—,” Dickinson writes in one of her poems, and to her cousins bleakly remarked, “If the anguish of others helped with one’s own, now would be many medicines.”
“I noticed that Robert Browning had made another poem,” she cont
inued, “and was astonished—till I remembered that I, myself, in my smaller way, sang off charnel steps. Every day life feels mightier, and what we have the power to be, more stupendous.”
It dont sound so terrible—quite—as it did—
I run it over—“Dead”, Brain—“Dead”.
Put it in Latin—left of my school—
Seems it dont shriek so—under rule.
Perhaps under the rule of poetry, the shrieking will stop. “We—tell a Hurt—to cool it—,” she writes in another poem, reminding us that she told Higginson she sang to relieve a palsy. Of what she did not say. Yet anguish and bereavement paradoxically toughened her (“An actual suffering strengthens / As Sinews do, with Age—”). As did poetry. In her second letter to him, she sent “Of all the Sounds despatched abroad,” ostensibly about the wind but containing an implicit tribute to the poet, whose fingers comb the sky:
Of all the Sounds despatched abroad,
There’s not a Charge to me
Like that old measure in the Boughs—
That phraseless Melody—
The Wind does—working like a Hand,
Whose fingers Comb the Sky—
Then quiver down—with tufts of Tune—
Permitted Gods, and me—
WHAT DID HIGGINSON really think when he first read Dickinson’s poetry? “The bee himself did not evade the schoolboy more than she evaded me,” he wrote, recalling his bafflement, “and even at this day I still stand somewhat bewildered, like the boy.”
This one arrived in the summer of 1862:
A Bird, came down the Walk—
He did not know I saw—
He bit an Angle Worm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw,
And then, he drank a Dew
From a convenient Grass—
And then hopped sidewise to the Wall
To let a Beetle pass—
He glanced with rapid eyes,
That hurried all abroad—
They looked like frightened Beads, I thought,
He stirred his Velvet Head.—
Like one in danger, Cautious,
I offered him a Crumb,
And he unrolled his feathers,
And rowed him softer Home—
Than Oars divide the Ocean,
Too silver for a seam,
Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon,
Leap, plashless as they swim.
The poem’s surface charm would not be lost on Higginson: a bird, scrupulously observed by the speaker (“rapid eyes…like frightened Beads”), takes his morning meal. But there is nothing romantic here: the bird eats the angleworm raw. And what about the off rhymes (abroad / Head, Crumb / Home)? The collective nouns (“Dew,” “Grass”) introduced by singular articles (“a Dew,” “a…Grass”)? The dashes? Certainly this looked unlike anything he had ever seen. And who is in danger, who is cautious, the speaker or the bird? Are the two of them forever separate, alien from each other, as the bird’s flight at the end of the poem, so meticulously described, suggests?
More easily comprehended, not just by Higginson but by everyone, was Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” published in The Atlantic in the winter of 1862 and sung by Union troops to the tune of “John Brown’s Body.” (Said Ralph Waldo Emerson of Howe, “I could well wish she were a native of Massachusetts. We have no such poetess in New England.”) Howe delivered public poetry to an eager audience bred on the verse regularly printed in newspapers and magazines, set to music, or adapted by politicians to their ends. When the Hutchinson Family Singers included one of Whittier’s abolitionist poems in their repertoire, set to the melody of Luther’s hymn “Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott,” they lost their permit to give concerts because, it was alleged, the Union troops resented their radical politics. But Salmon Chase, secretary of the Treasury, read the poem during a Cabinet meeting, and Lincoln said it was just the thing he wanted the troops to hear. The ban was lifted.
Higginson’s friend Whittier was well liked, particularly after the publication of his postwar masterwork, Snow-Bound (1866), which sold a whopping twenty thousand copies within months of its appearance. And Higginson’s former teacher, the genteel Henry Longfellow, had already been selling poems by the bushel. His first volume, Voices of the Night (1839), went through three printings. Here are four lilting stanzas of iambic tetrameter from one his most beloved works, “A Psalm of Life”:
Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!—
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.
Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.
Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.
The fourth stanza deserves comparison with Dickinson’s “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain”:
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading—treading—till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through—
And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum—
Kept beating—beating—till I thought
My mind was going numb—
And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space—began to toll,
As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here—
And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down—
And hit a World, at every plunge—
And Finished knowing—then—
Dickinson’s sensibility—never mind her use of form—could not be more different. While the virtuosic bard, a master of several languages and author of the famous Evangeline and the equally famous Courtship of Miles Standish, stretched himself across poetic genres (ballad, pastoral, folk epic), she did not care about genre or story or about pleasing the average audience. (Longfellow would please even the queen of England, who granted him a private audience.) Where Longfellow aims toward universal uplift, Dickinson stays alone, her tenor somber, her wit quick, her rhymes dissonant, and her images (“Being, but an Ear”) typically raucous and strangely splendid. A temperate man who always looked to the horizon, Longfellow aimed to forge a national myth; Dickinson burrowed deep into the individual soul, tapping feelings often suppressed, unacknowledged, recondite, and fearsome.
Dickinson carefully read Browning and Emerson, enthusiasms she shared with Higginson (he adored Emerson’s “Days”), and Higginson recommended Browning’s Pippa Passes. Of women poets they both admired Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Emily Brontë, but Higginson was also promoting the verse of Harriet Spofford. (Spofford’s short story “Circumstance, in which a woman calms a hideous forest beast by singing to it, was the only story, said Dickinson, she could not imagine having written herself.) Sue later remembered Spofford’s “Pomegranate-Flowers” as a swatch of vivid color in those old sepia-seeming Atlantic Monthlys.
Now all the swamps are flushed with dower
Of viscid pink, where, hour by hour,
The bees swim amorous, and a shower
Reddens the stream where cardinals tower.
Far lost in fern of fragrant stir
Her fancies roam, for unto her
All Nature came in this one flower.
Despite its lush decor, the tightly wound Spofford poem is phonically tedious. Dick
inson is not. She pauses where we least expect a pause, and she bunches phrases in unusual lyric clusters. Aware of her metrical innovations—and no doubt of her sensuality, too—Higginson in his first letter to her perceptively asked Dickinson what she thought of Walt Whitman. She said she avoided him, having heard he was scandalous. (She also said she’d been so haunted by “Circumstance” she now avoided its author.)
Likely she fibbed. She had told Sue she wanted to read all of Spofford’s work—and regarding Whitman, she did know that guardians of high culture like Charles Eliot Norton, a friend of Higginson’s, said he’d be sorry to learn that a woman had read beyond the title page of Leaves of Grass. “It is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote Leaves of Grass,” Higginson himself would say in 1870, “only that he did not burn it afterwards.”
Higginson had met Whitman ten years earlier, having bumped into him at the Washington Street offices of the radical Boston publishers William Thayer and Charles Eldridge. Sitting on a counter, the poet had come to read proofs of the third edition of Leaves of Grass, and though handsome and burly, he did not look, as Higginson would remember, “to my gymnasium-trained eye, in really good condition for athletic work. I perhaps felt a little prejudiced against him from having read ‘Leaves of Grass’ on a voyage, in the early stages of seasickness,—a fact which doubtless increased for me the intrinsic unsavoriness of certain passages. But the personal impression made on me by the poet was not so much of manliness as of Boweriness, if I may coin the phrase.”
Yet while Whitman stood apart from the pulling and hauling of a commercial America, of all his contemporaries he best bridged the gulf between public and private—and between action and contemplation—which Higginson hoped to do. Like Dickinson, he sang, and he sang of himself, but his inclusive vision celebrated and touched, or aimed to touch, the broad expanse of people and place and preoccupation that made America. Higginson would dismiss this as rank hypocrisy. “We all looked to him as precisely the man to organize a regiment on Broadway,” he later said; but Whitman chose “the minor & safe function of a nurse.” Higginson thus resented Drum-Taps even more than Leaves of Grass—war poems written by one who had never carried a drum.
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