And yet with all this—the treatments, the fear of blindness, the war, the displacement—Dickinson continued to sing from those charnel steps. For in spite of everything, she, like Higginson, discovered self-renewal in natural recurrence, which was not revelation, resurrection, or religious cant. It was a pensive faith, calm and courageous, and a gift to Higginson in a lovely poem about the crickets of late summer:
Further in Summer than the Birds
Pathetic from the Grass
A minor Nation celebrates
It’s unobtrusive Mass.
No Ordinance be seen
So gradual the Grace
A pensive Custom it becomes
Enlarging Loneliness.
Antiquest felt at Noon
When August burning low
Arise this spectral Canticle
Repose to typify
Remit as yet no Grace
No Furrow on the Glow
Yet a Druidic Difference
Enhances Nature now
The crickets’ chirping—an “unobtrusive Mass,” both in the literal sense of being small and in the more figurative religious sense—initially strikes us as pathetic: the crickets are such an inconsequential nation, unlike, say, mighty America. But in them we can hear “August burning low,” and though we realize we face death alone and unprotected, the almost primitive sound of these small creatures—a “spectral Canticle”—offers us the solace of “a Druidic Difference”: rituals of birth and death, beginnings and ends, in song.
Likely written just after the war, the poem was mailed to Higginson along with a brief message; Carlo, her dog, had died, she told him, and then she asked needlessly, “Would you instruct me now?”
NINE
No Other Way
A man of any feeling must feed his imagination;
there must be a woman of whom he can dream.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Malbone
Tuesday, August 16. The heat wave over, fresh rural breezes rustled the treetops when shortly after two o’clock Colonel Higginson sauntered over to Main Street from the Amherst Inn. He had never been to Amherst before. It struck him as a small, sweet, typical New England town framed by those lovely, lilting Pelham Hills—and deadly dull on a summer’s afternoon.
Slender, long legged, and in the bloom of middle age at forty-six, his hair black and without a glint of silver, Higginson, with his ramrod posture and positive step, kept his lapses of confidence to himself—that “inward darkness,” as he once called it. His public persona demanded the mask, and besides it wasn’t entirely false: he was a preternaturally hopeful man, tediously good-natured, polite, fastidious, gallant, and benign.
He had been hoping to make this visit for a while. Eight years had passed since he first opened Dickinson’s small envelope with its fantastic enclosures, but the war had intervened, and right afterward he had been busy rounding up contributors for the Harvard Memorial Biographies. He had written thirteen of the entries himself. And there were the speaking engagements he did not turn down and those essays he wrote almost compulsively, as if addicted to the immediate gratification of seeing his name in print. He wrote swiftly, easily; he would have liked to dig deeper into his imagination, but there was never time.
He also translated Petrarch’s sonnets and the discourses of Epictetus, the Stoic moralist born a slave, whose opening sentence in the Encheiridion reads, as Higginson put it, “There are things which are within our power, and there are things which are beyond our power.” We must let go the things beyond our power. But this seems to protect the status quo, Henry James pointed out in his review of the translation, though James also admitted that Epictetus was “a man among men, an untiring observer, and a good deal of a satirist”—rather like Higginson, as a matter of fact. “When you do anything from a clear judgment that it ought to be done, never shrink from being seen to do it, even though the world should misunderstand it,” Higginson had translated from book 35 of the Encheiridion. “For if you are not acting rightly, shun the action itself; if you are, why fear those who wrongly censure you?”
While Higginson’s Epictetus defined integrity for him, his translation of Petrarch’s sonnets revealed passions of a different stripe. “I seem to find her now, and now perceive / How far away she is; now rise, now fall.” To him, Laura was the incarnation of art and beauty, though these postwar days, he complained dolefully, “nobody comprehends Petrarch. Philosophers and sensualists all refuse to believe that his dream of Laura went on, even when he had a mistress and a child. Why not? Every one must have something to which his dreams can cling, amid the degradations of actual life, and this tie is more real than the degradation; and if he holds to the tie, it will one day save.” He dwelled in possibility.
Emily Dickinson may or may not have been Higginson’s Laura, but at home there was poor unhappy Mary, whose suffering he could hardly bear. Virtually paralyzed, her fingers so stiff she turned the pages of a book with a wand, she sat in her chair day after day, forgivably querulous and upset. His home had become a hospital, he confided to his diary, and Mary, crying for the pain he was powerless to relieve, begged him over and over not to leave her, and yet she chided him so mercilessly and so often his friends marveled he did not ship her off to a real hospital. “On the whole I think him an astonishing success under difficulties!—,” observed one. “What would become of you, for instance, or me, to sleep where he sleeps—embrace what he embraces!”
But that he and Dickinson had not yet met face-to-face, despite Higginson’s schedule and his obligations, was not entirely his fault. She had been difficult. Cajole as he might, she would not budge from Amherst. He had proposed that she come to Boston: “All ladies do,” he said. Doubtless he said just the wrong thing. “I had promised to visit my Physician for a few days in May,” she cordially replied to him in 1866, “but Father objects because he is in the habit of me.” He tried to reassure her, inviting her to one of the Radical Club meetings, perfectly respectable, taking place every third Monday of the month at the Sargents’ on Beacon Hill. Men—and women—presented papers on religion and science. Emerson was reading one. If that seemed too intimate or not to her liking, there was also the Woman’s Club on Tremont Street, which would be celebrating Margaret Fuller’s life and work. He himself would read a paper on the Greek goddesses, he added with some pride, although on that particular day, he reflected, he would not be able to pay as much attention to her as he’d like.
Dickinson politely rebuffed him. “I must omit Boston. Father prefers so,” she explained. “He likes me to travel with him but objects that I visit.” Her refusal didn’t deter him from asking again; she had to be more blunt: “I do not cross my Father’s ground,” she flatly stated, “to any House or town.” The incredulous Higginson would understand more, or think he did, when he met her father. “Thin dry & speechless,” he remarked with a tad of aversion.
In the summer of 1870, the death of his elder brother Stephen, who had been staying near Amherst, gave Higginson an opportunity to meet at last the strange poet who’d dropped into his world so abruptly, who seemed alternately fragile and sturdy, who bewildered him with an intelligence and a wryness and a will unlike that of anyone he had ever encountered. As far as he could tell, she confounded everyone. In Worcester he had spoken to one of her uncles, who shed no light at all, and though he would soon chat with the current president of Amherst College, he learned little more than he had already divined in their eight-year correspondence—that “there is always one thing to be grateful for—,” as she would tell Higginson, “that one is one’s self & not somebody else.” She was definitely her own self.
She cowed him. “Sometimes I take out your letters & verses, dear friend, and when I feel their strange power, it is not strange that I find it hard to write & that long months pass,” he admitted to her in one of the letters of his that do survive. “I have the greatest desire to see you, always feeling that if I could once take you by the hand I might be something to you; but
till then you only enshroud yourself in this fiery mist & I cannot reach you, but only rejoice in the rare sparkles of light.”
What did he want to be to her? He hardly knew. “I am always the same toward you, & never relax my interest in what you send to me,” he told her. “I should like to hear from you very often, but feel always timid lest what I write should be badly aimed & miss that fine edge of thought which you bear. It would be so easy, I fear, to miss you.” He knew his limits.
If only he could see her, touch her hand, assure himself that she was real. Otherwise, she would remain a fantasy, even an obsession. How was it that she had such an unaccountable way of saying things? Perhaps because she lived with and for herself and her poetry? But to live so alone, so cut off from the rest of the world? “Of ‘shunning Men and Women’—,” she answered in an early letter, “they talk of Hallowed things, aloud—and embarrass my Dog—He and I dont object to them, if they’ll exist their side.” Higginson came to see she was not really isolated—it was as if he was thinking out loud: “It isolates one anywhere to think beyond a certain point or have such luminous flashes as come to you—so perhaps the place does not make much difference.”
It did not. Remarkable.
He now stood at the door of the frowning Homestead, brown brick, with its gracious side garden and its tall, unwelcoming trees—a country lawyer’s place, he noticed with uncharacteristic condescension. Dickinson said she would be waiting. “I will be at Home,” she had written him, “and glad.”
He pulled the bell. A servant opened the heavy door. Offering his card, he was shown to a dark, stiff parlor cluttered with books and decorated with the predictably dim engravings. The piano lid was raised, but what caught his attention was the table where someone had conspicuously placed his Out-Door Papers and his recently published novel, Malbone. He had been welcomed.
In a few minutes he heard what sounded to him, as he later said, like a child’s step rushing in the hall. Then an airy, slim form appeared: Emily Dickinson, her dress white, her shawl blue, her hair Titian red, parted in the middle and pulled back. She carried two daylilies in her hand, which she placed in his. “These are my introduction,” she whispered. “How long will you stay?”
FIVE YEARS HAD PASSED since the end of the war. She had continued to write poetry, but at a far slower rate. In his fine variorum edition of her work, Ralph Franklin, her most recent editor, estimates 229 poems in 1865 but not many more than 12 per year until 1870, when he counts 28. Of course, no one really knows: many poems may be lost or unrecovered or contained in letters themselves lost or unrecovered. One thing seems sure: after the flurry of poems published in 1864, “The Snake” (“A narrow Fellow in the Grass”) was the only other one ever to appear in print in her lifetime.
It first surfaced on February 14, 1866, on the front page of the Springfield Daily Republican. An implied rejoinder to Whittier’s more sentimental “Barefoot Boy,” the poem is a carefree account of a boy’s “transport / Of Cordiality” with “Nature’s People.” But nature also eludes him (this is a theme in Dickinson’s work), for when the boy stoops to pick up a snake that Whittier’s boy never even sees, “It wrinkled And was gone—.” And, as the speaker concludes, he
…never met this Fellow
Attended or alone
Without a tighter Breathing
And Zero at the Bone.
In that ravishing final image, “Zero at the Bone,” Dickinson manages in an instant to link the boy, chilled to the marrow, to the creature of backbone: our fears, ourselves. It’s a quick, condensed performance of Dickinson at her bristling best.
Again insisting to Higginson that she “did not print,” as she phrased it, she nonetheless enclosed a newspaper clipping of the poem when she wrote him, “lest you meet my Snake,” she explained, “and suppose I deceive it was robbed of me.” (She may have already given him a holograph copy of the poem and now worried lest he stumble across it in the paper.) But her scruple was a cover, for she seemed just as intent on demonstrating that the poem was worth publishing in the first place.
And like any professional writer, she objected to editorial glad-handing: “defeated too of the third line by the punctuation,” she complained to Higginson. “The third and fourth were one—.” In the Republican’s version of the poem, the first four lines read:
A narrow fellow in the grass
Occasionally rides;
You may have met him—did you not?
His notice instant is,
The question mark ending line 3 does in fact defeat the enjambment of lines 3 and 4 that exists in one of her manuscripts, as follows:
You may have met Him—did you not
His notice instant is—
But whether Samuel Bowles or his literary editor, Dr. Holland, another Dickinson family friend, mangled the poem, neither man robbed her of it. Josiah Holland, though more conservative than Bowles, was himself a writer of popular poems and essays, under the pseudonym Timothy Titcomb, and he, like Bowles, appreciated Dickinson’s privacy too much to betray it.
Yet to Higginson she pretended otherwise. The poem had been stolen, she had insisted, and of course she had no other mentor than he, certainly not Bowles or Holland, whose friendship with her she did not mention. “If I still entreat you to teach me, are you much displeased?” she asked, seemingly without guile. And if he was satisfied with her explanation, they could continue on the same footing as before, she said; she would be patient, constant, a good little girl welcoming his criticism (“your knife”).
As if to reiterate her willingness to undergo his scalpel, she enclosed another poem:
A Death blow is a Life blow to Some
Who till they died, did not alive become—
Who had they lived—had died but when
They died, Vitality begun—
Written by no little girl, the poem is about people who don’t know how to live, and she does, she suggests—through poetry, which released her, energized her, refreshed her, and relieved, as she had said, that awful palsy.
What did he answer? What could he? Unfortunately, Higginson did not want us to know, for though he saved and catalogued a huge inventory of correspondence, diaries, journals, and jottings, he evidently destroyed those personal papers he deemed too intimate for public consumption. But in a fragment of a letter to Dickinson that luckily survives, he sounds less like a colonel, a literary critic, or a buttoned-up editor than a beseeching lover, diffident before the individual he prized above all others. “Still, you see, I try,” he told her. He wanted to know her. “I think if I could once see you & know that you are real, I might fare better.”
“I would like to be what you deem me,” she humbly answered, inviting him to be her guest at the local inn.
“It is hard [for me] to understand how you can live so alone,” he said again, “with thoughts of such a quality coming up in you.”
These were honest letters; they spoke of heartache and pain, nature and art, and the consolations one may or may not find there. “To undertake is to achieve,” Dickinson reminded him in one of the poems she sent him. They spoke of what troubled them: loss, friendship; and more discreetly, far less directly, they spoke of their feelings. He must have opened himself to her. “You mention Immortality,” she noted. “That is the Flood subject. I was told that the Bank was the safest place for a Finless mind.”
Was Higginson’s mind finless? Did he dare tell her of the doubts or ambitions he generally kept to himself? of his desire for immortality? “The ‘infinite Beauty’—of which you speak comes too near to seek,” she replied.
“To escape enchantment,” she added, “one must always flee. Paradise is of the option.”
Though infinite Beauty was said to be Paradise, or so she had been taught, she was not so certain. Even if death is seductive—that promise of an eternal Paradise—one must nevertheless live. “Time is a test of trouble,” she wrote, including verse in the body of a letter to Higginson in the spring of 1866,
If such it prove, it prove too
There was no malady.
She sent him more poems: as well as “To undertake is to achieve,” there was “Blazing in Gold and quenching in Purple” (published in Drum Beat), “Ample make this Bed—,” and the tender lyric “As imperceptibly as Grief.”
As imperceptibly as Grief
The Summer lapsed away—
Too imperceptible at last
To feel like Perfidy—
A Quietness distilled
As Twilight long begun
Or Nature spending with herself
Sequestered Afternoon.
The Dusk drew earlier in
The Morning foreign shone
A Courteous yet harrowing grace
As Guest that would be gone
And thus without a Wing
Or service of a keel
Our Summer made her light escape
Into the Beautiful.
Her description of the summer may be her description of him: the guest that would disappear, if he ever came, and her idea of him never quite fulfilled by his presence. And he could assume that the diaphanous summer, making its light escape, is like Dickinson herself, a guest come for a moment to stay but a moment, her grace courteous yet unaccountably exacting, her life sequestered and yet not soundless—never that—but provocative and beautiful. Higginson could recognize her in the summer, and if he came to Amherst in the summer, he certainly would.
“Is it more far to Amherst?”
IN THE SUMMER OF 1867, she dashed off a few lines: “Bringing still my ‘plea for culture,’ would it teach me now?” she asked, referring this time to his recent Atlantic article, “A Plea for Culture.” Again she included another poem sure to flatter him:
The Luxury to apprehend
The Luxury ’twould be
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