Emily Dickinson Daguerreotype (restored)
On travels when KumKum and I are near enough to a poet’s grave or museum to pay a visit, we go. In this manner we have paid our respects to Keats, Ghalib, Melville, Wharton, Longfellow and Poe, and this time we were driven from Boston to Amherst to see the Emily Dickinson Museum, located in the house where she spent the major part of her life.
Emily Dickinson's house - she worked in the upper right bedroom
The docent who guided a group of seven was a retired lady, specialising in 19th century history, and had an intimate familiarity with the life of ED and her close family (sister Lavinia, brother Austin and future sister-in-law Susan). She said there were many myths about the poet – that she was a recluse, that no one in her lifetime knew she wrote poetry, that she never left Amherst, etc.
ED was a fond aunt to children who came to play in the grounds outside
her upper storey bedroom, and would lower shortbread cookies to them in a
basket. There is a museum of her memorabilia in Harvard University, at the Emily
Dickinson Room of the Houghton Library,
which preserves “more than a thousand autograph poems, and some
300 letters, by Emily Dickinson, and is the largest Dickinson collection in the
world, including additionally such treasures as the poet’s Herbarium.” The
herbarium was a collection of pressed specimens of plants ED made in her youth. Replicas of her bureau (chest of drawers), chair and small
table stand in her room.
Cherry bureau and small cherry writing table and chair in ED's bedroom
The writing table’s surface is small; it could not have held more than the working sheet of paper she wrote on. The original furniture is at Harvard. It is spare for a poet furnished with such a lavish imagination.
The bureau contained the fascicles (little booklets) into which ED hand-sewed
her precious poems and let them lie.
Since July 2016 the Museum has allowed visitors to rent her bedroom for $100 an hour and sit and write at her desk:
https://www.nytimes.com/video/books/100000005045504/emily-dickinson-bedroom-writing-alone-360.html
The ED house has a small shop at the entrance:
Emily Dickinson Museum - the small shop at the entrance to the house
selling poems and
books, including a 3-volume variorum edition
“The
Johnson edition of 1955 (the old "definitive" edition) of the
complete poems makes choices for the reader -- choices which, unfortunately,
are not always the best. This new edition presents the poetry with all the
variations intact, so that the reader could choose for him/herself a particular
reading when Dickinson herself did not leave a final preference.”
As
for why she did not publish, the docent told us it was because ED had many
alternative words for particular lines in her poems and could not decide. Poets
always have alternatives when they search for the best expressions of their
thoughts, and have to decide which one creates the surprise or the harmony
intended. That is the reason why poets publish revisions in later editions. So an
inability to decide the best word choice could hardly be a reason to desist from
publication.
She
wrote to a contributor in the Atlantic
Monthly, Thomas Higginson, sending four poems and asking his opinion: “say
if my Verse is alive.” This may have been a fateful mistake, for he, not
knowing that she had already written several hundred poems (her output was 1,700+
by the time she died), and being a non-poet himself and a poor judge of
literary merit, as history bears out, “counseled her to work longer and harder
on her poetry before she attempted its publication.” You can read more at
ED
was in a small town devoid of poets, and she had no personal contact with true literary
figures. This Higginson gambit seems to have been her first and only attempt to
get published, and it met with the rebuff of a man who had little capacity to
enter the mind or poetry of ED.
But
the world of poetry did not lose. After her death in 1886 her family discovered
the hand-sewn fascicles in her bureau containing more than a thousand poems. Since it was her
practice to send letters to friends and relatives with poems, and hundreds were
sent, it is quite possible several hundred more are lost, when the receiver
did not preserve those letters and transmit them to the executors of her literary estate.
The
query to Higginson may be the clue to why she did not publish. When a poet of
her outstanding genius stoops to ask a comparative hack his opinion of her
poetry, it is a sign of diffidence, arising from her own high bar for versification
to be considered poetry. She was not convinced her poetry matched the standard she
hoped to attain – that I think is the reason she gave them away as trifles in
letters, often not even bothering to keep a master copy before dispatching them
in chatty missives to friends and relatives.
Her
one visit to Boston (by rail) was to have her eyesight examined. A severe
difficulty in vision set in and this was reflected in her handwriting. In the
annotations for her Herbarium it is minute (8-point), elegant and cursive. It remains
cursive but becomes quite large (16-point) after the difficulty in vision, and later
it takes the form of disjoint printed characters.
A
hundred yards away stands the much more luxurious home connected by a narrow
walkway which she described as "just wide enough for two who love."
KumKum & Joe standing by the walkway from Emily's to the home of her brother, Austin, described by her as 'just wide enough for two who love'
The new home was built for her brother, Austin, by their father, with the
intention of retaining him in Amherst. Austin was also a lawyer like their
father, and like him became the Treasurer of Amherst College, the institution started
by the grandfather. Austin and wife Susan enjoyed the luxuries of life – two live-in
servants, paintings on the wall, plush furniture and an elegant dining room
where they entertained guests. The docent read from a menu for Valentine’s Day
which was on exhibit beside the dining service laid out. It was a sumptuous
meal with many courses such as might have been served in a royal palace!
As
to why ED did not marry – the question should not even come up in modern times
since the feminist movement has led us to believe that women can do as they wish,
and their fulfillment in life is not necessarily tied to marriage or childbearing.
However, in those times it was uncommon for women to remain unmarried. Then why
ED? She certainly was a vivacious and witty person in her youth, and exchanged
a Valentine’s poem with a young man in her father’s office. KumKum thinks ED
remained single because of her domineering father’s disapproval of the men she considered
favourably as suitors. Is she confusing with Elizabeth Barrett Browning (whom
ED admired)?
But
there may be an alternate explanation. She was after all ready to exercise her
own judgment in many matters, e.g., at a certain point when the revivalist
ardour got too much for her, she ceased going to the Congregationalist church,
and wrote the poem (#236) which begins
Some keep the Sabbath
going to Church –
I keep it, staying at
Home –
She
drifted away from college after ten months at Mount Holyoke. She decided to wear
white. She knew her mind and did as she thought fit. But she was a poet in her
mind and her imagination, one with a reflective bent and a fine ability to
surprise. Perhaps she never found a man whose sympathy for her temperament would
make him a good companion for life.
From The Emily Dickinson Handbook by Gudrun Grabher
She
was no wall-flower; at age 14 she wrote about herself in a letter to a friend,
saying she had no doubt she would be ‘the belle of the ball’ when debutantes
came out at age 17. She certainly had suitors. And being determined
to follow her own thinking, she would not have been lacking in courage to pursue
a relationship, had she found one that suited her singular temperament. The fact
is she found her writing vocation early and pursued that. Her poems have a
quality of arising out of meditation. She must have been alone with her
thoughts much of the time to give birth to such poems as she did. That kind of sensitive,
meditative mind demands a definite sympathy in a potential partner. Could such men, rare at the best of times, have been easy to come by in a small town?
Among
the major influences on her poetry are the Bible and Nature. You can recognize
the hymnal beat of quatrains 8/6/8/6 in much of her poetry. She is full of God, but not as a
conventional pietist might be. Her take on God and his immanence in the world
is akin to that of a mystic, but she does not preach from any particular religious persuasion.
She observed Nature closely and her descriptions yield the particulars of her
observation, such as this:
(#1096)
A
narrow fellow in the grass
Occasionally
rides.
You
may have met him, — did you not?
His
notice sudden is.
The
grass divides as with a comb,
A
spotted shaft is seen;
And
then it closes at your feet
And
opens further on.
He
likes a boggy acre,
A
floor too cool for corn.
Yet
when a boy, and barefoot,
I
more than once, at noon,
Have
passed, I thought, a whiplash
Unbraiding
in the sun;
When,
stooping to secure it,
It
wrinkled and was gone.
…
The
unique signature of her poems lies in the unusual words and pairing of words.
For her Nature was ever new, and she had to find NEW words, or at least, a new word ordering, to capture its eternal newness and pass it on to coming
generations.
KumKum & Joe at Emily Dickinson's grave
The poem I read at her grave in the cemetery (behind a Mobil
gas station on Pleasant Street) was this:
(#214)
I
taste a liquor never brewed –
From
Tankards scooped in Pearl –
Not
all the Frankfort Berries
Yield
such an Alcohol!
Inebriate
of air – am I –
And
Debauchee of Dew –
Reeling
– thro’ endless summer days –
From
inns of molten Blue –
When
“Landlords” turn the drunken Bee
Out
of the Foxglove’s door –
When
Butterflies – renounce their “drams” –
I
shall but drink the more!
Till
Seraphs swing their snowy Hats –
And
Saints – to windows run –
To
see the little Tippler
Leaning
against the – Sun!
A
short round of applause ensued. While Joe was declaiming this in the
presence of a handful of others visiting ED’s grave, his grandson, Gael, was standing
twenty yards off. Later he confessed his embarrassment at the loud and public recitation, and said he saw a visitor shake his head and roll his eyes, as if to
wonder at the brazen behavior of his Opa.
Grand-daughter Elsa reads two poems to Emily at her grave:
'I'm a Nobody Who are you' and 'Tell all the truth but tell it slant'
Then
Elsa, our grand-daughter wanted to read, so I pointed her to a poem in the small book
I bought at the Museum shop:
(#260)
I’m
Nobody! Who are you?
Are
you – Nobody – too?
Then
there’s a pair of us!
Don’t
tell! they’d advertise – you know!
How
dreary – to be – Somebody!
How
public – like a Frog –
To
tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To
an admiring Bog!
(‘livelong
day’ is an alternate version given by ED)
I
consider the second stanza to be her sending up of twitterati whom she’d
foreseen 150 years in advance. Elsa recited another curious one:
(#1263)
Tell
all the truth but tell it slant —
Success
in Circuit lies
Too
bright for our infirm Delight
The
Truth's superb surprise
As
Lightning to the Children eased
With
explanation kind
The
Truth must dazzle gradually
Or
every man be blind —
Grandson Gael before a huge mural in the cemetery with Emily Dickinson beaming over the proceedings
Useful Web References
The
Emily Dickinson Museum includes The Homestead, where poet Emily Dickinson was born
and lived most of her life, and the home of the poet’s brother and his family.
The two houses share three acres of the original Dickinson property in the
center of Amherst, Massachusetts.
The
Emily Dickinson Collection at Harvard University, Houghton Library
Dickinson
Electronic Archives
A
creative and critical collaboratory and digital repository for reading
Dickinson's material, featuring new critical and theoretical work about Emily
Dickinson's writings, biography, reception, and influence. It is a scholarly
resource exploring the potential of the digital environment to reveal new
interpretive material, cultural, historical, and theoretical contexts
http://www.edickinson.org/
The Emily Dickinson Archive makes high-resolution images of Dickinson’s surviving manuscripts available in open access, and provides readers with a website through which they can view images of manuscripts held in multiple libraries and archives.
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2013/10/the-digital-dickinson/
The story behind the Emily Dickinson Archive, a collaborative project of Harvard University Press and a growing number of repositories that own examples of Dickinson’s original work. The biggest are Houghton Library, Amherst College, and the Boston Public Library.
An
extensive 10,000 word biography of Emily Dickinson
The
informative Wikipedia entry for Emily Dickinson
Emily
Dickinson's Life – short
Book
The World of Emily Dickinson - A Visual Biography by Polly Longsworth (W.W. Norton & Company, 1997). Also on Google Books at
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