TWELVE
Your Face is more joyful, when you speak.” Emily Dickinson looked at the photograph Higginson had mailed her, comparing it with the face she herself had seen twice. “I miss an almost arrogant look that at times haunts you—but with that exception, it is so real I could think it you.”
His arrogant look evaporated with Mary’s death. Accustomed to her presence—and her dependence—he found himself agitated, helpless, unmoored. “How little there seems left to be done,” he muttered, “how strange and almost unwelcome the freedom.” He might lecture in the West, which he had long wished to do, for he could not stay alone in their rented rooms in Newport. He might go back to Europe. He might even go to Amherst.
With sorrow
That the
Joy is
past, to
make you
happy first,
distrustful,
of its
duplicate
in a
hastening
world.
Your scholar
Dickinson scribbled her note on graph paper, then quickly sent another:
Perhaps she does not go so far
As you who stay—suppose—
Perhaps comes closer, for the lapse
Of her Corporeal Clothes—
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in photograph sent to Emily Dickinson, 1876.
“If I could help you?” she asked.
MORE PRACTICED THAN HE in the stages of bereavement, she counseled him kindly and by degrees. “Danger is not at first, for then we are unconscious, but in the after—slower—Days. Do not try to be saved—but let Redemption find you—as it certainly will—Love is it’s own rescue, for we—at our supremest, are but it’s trembling Emblems.”
Redemption will find him; his love for Mary will console him; perhaps he will love again. “To be human is more than to be divine,” Dickinson wisely reminded him, “for when Christ was divine, he was uncontented til he had been human.”
At least one Dickinson biographer has suggested that Vinnie hoped Higginson, with his wife dead, would marry her sister. Dickinson herself did not explicitly express any such wish beyond her relentless entreaty that Higginson return to Amherst. “I remember nothing so strong as to see you,” she wrote him. “I hope you may come.”
And when Samuel Bowles—nervous, ill, unable to sleep—died in early January 1878 (“Dear Mr Bowles found out too late,” Dickinson grieved, “that Vitality costs itself”), again she turned to the Colonel. “I felt it shelter to speak with you,” she told him the day Bowles was buried. “When you have lost a friend, Master you remember you could not begin again, because there was no World. I have thought of you often since the Darkness—though we cannot assist another’s Night—.” One wonders in vain how Higginson responded: tenderly, no doubt, and hinting that he might come to Amherst after all.
Instead he went south. A military Rip Van Winkle (or so he saw himself ) bent on revisiting Jacksonville and Beaufort after more than a dozen years—it had been that long—Higginson in 1878 sought out a place he and Mary had not shared, and a moment in history, his moment, forever gone. Fifty-four years old and sporting what Edmund Wilson later called his “inalienable muttonchop whiskers,” Higginson, a private citizen not a soldier, landed in Jacksonville, which at one time he could have burned to the ground with just a nod of his head. “I began to feel fearfully bewildered,” he remarked, “as if I had lived a multitude of lives.” In South Carolina he trotted on horseback over the new shell road linking Beaufort to Port Royal. The old fortifications had disappeared, and Higginsonville, the freedmen’s village named for him, had blown away in a tornado. In its place stretched a large, flat national cemetery. “An individual seems so insignificant in the presence of the changes of time,” Higginson remarked; “he is nothing, even if his traces are mingled with fire & blood.”
But he happened upon the wife of one of his soldiers, hoeing the field she’d hoed fifteen years earlier. “The same sky was above her, the same soil beneath her feet,” he commented, “but the war was over, slavery was gone. The soil that had been her master’s was now her own by purchase.” Rarely did he find ex-soldiers who likewise did not own their house and at least a patch of land. He shook hands with black teachers, preachers, and a black constabulary. “What more could be expected of any race, after fifteen years of freedom?” he asked. To us, he may sound supercilious, but he had run his fingers over the cold iron manacles worn by these same people, whose freedom, fifteen years before, was not at all assured.
And though there was poverty, there were no grievances, or none he cared to report. In Beaufort the houses had been repainted a cottony white, and even though the black population had few opportunities beyond menial employment, Higginson managed to find former soldiers from his regiment doing well. Corporal Sutton was a traveling minister; Sergeant Thomas Hodges, a master carpenter; and Sergeant Shemeltella, gun in hand, was patrolling the woods he had once picketed near Port Royal Ferry.
No one mentioned any “conspicuous” outrages, as he prudently noted in the July Atlantic, where he stated that he disbelieved rumors about the white population’s plotting to reenslave the black. “I hold it utterly ungenerous, to declare that the white people of the South have learned nothing by experience, and are incapable of change.” Although he said he could not of course form an opinion on the status of black women—they, unlike black men, were denied the vote—he had decided to see the glass half-full. Yet not two years earlier, six black men had been murdered, five in cold blood, and one white man killed in Hamburg, South Carolina, in an attempt to intimidate black voters and restore white supremacy. Incensed, Higginson had denounced the craven northern Democrats who, he believed, had made the massacre possible; two years later, in 1878, he was claiming that, if anything, black men and women suffered more indignity in the North—the Connecticut legislature had refused to authorize a black military company, and Rhode Island forbade interracial marriage—and as for the savageries (though unexaggerated, he said) of the Ku Klux Klan and the carpetbaggers, they had for the moment ceased.
Higginson looked for progress and found it, and yet he wasn’t utterly impervious to the simmering hatreds roiling the South. He admitted that the Republican party desperately, desperately needed to strengthen its grassroots organization, though he reiterated, almost nonchalantly, that each state should work out its own salvation. Federal intervention was a thing of the past. Reconstruction was over.
The sun having set on what remained of Higginson’s militant radicalism, he would no longer storm this barricade, his sense of injustice clear, clean, absolute. Nor did he shoulder regret.
“THE HOPE OF SEEING YOU was so sweet and serious—that seeing this—by the Papers, I fear it has failed,” Emily wrote him, attaching a clipping from the Springfield Republican. Since he was still a celebrity of sorts, his comings and goings of interest to the general public, she had unfortunately learned of his trip south from a newspaper squib. He had not gone back to Amherst. Nor did he intend to go now. Instead he headed off to Europe again, promising to visit her in the fall. “Is this the Hope that opens and shuts,” she skeptically replied, “like the eye of the Wax Doll?”
Despite her disappointment, she knew he needed to be away from anything that might remind him of Mary. She provided another poem.
How brittle are the Piers
On which our Faith doth tread—
No Bridge below doth totter so—
Yet none hath such a Crowd.
It is as old as God—
Indeed—’twas built by him—
He sent his Son to test the Plank—
And he pronounced it firm.
It was difficult to keep faith; no one knew this better than she. And that was never truer than the spring before Higginson sailed, when her frail mother fell and broke her hip, when for months Austin shook with fever, and when the first seizures of epilepsy racked her nephew Ned. “I have felt like a troubled Top,” Emily told Elizabeth Holland, “that spun without reprieve.”
Still Wentworth did not come. This time armed with introductions and anecdotes—he had studied with Longfellow, he had dined with Mark Twain—in London and Paris he played the public intellectual sprung from the land of buffalo and savages. In Paris he attended meetings on prison reform, about which he knew nothing; he heard Victor Hugo at the Voltaire centenary; he met with the aging revolutionaries of 1848; he tried and failed to have women admitted to the Association littéraire internationale; he met Turgenev, whose work he adored. He traveled through Normandy and then to Germany, stopping in Cologne and Bingen and Frankfurt, rereading Goethe, and in Nuremberg he saw Dürer’s house.
In London he spoke at a woman suffrage meeting and at the Freemasons’ Tavern in support of keeping picture galleries open on Sundays; he scoffed at the smooth-faced boys guarding the queen as poor specimens compared with his black regiment; and he cringed when he learned Whitman was the American poet du jour, not Lowell or Whittier. He again visited with two of his heroes, Darwin and Carlyle. Darwin looked older and frailer than last time. Carlyle, steeped in solitude, called himself a man left behind, waiting for death.
The comment so rattled Higginson that as soon as he arrived back in Newport, he collected his things and within two weeks had settled himself at 17 Kirkland Street in Cambridge, near boyhood haunts. Intending to remarry, build his own home, and raise the children he longed for, the very next month he announced his engagement to Mary (Minnie) Potter Thacher of Newton, Massachusetts, a gray-eyed woman with a peachy complexion, twenty-two years younger than he.
No one had suspected the romance, least of all Emily, who wrote him soon after his return stateside to say how “joyful” she was. “There is no one so happy her Master is happy as his grateful Pupil,” she politely wrote him. “The most noble congratulation it ever befell me to offer—,” she cryptically added, “is that you are yourself.” This was one of her highest compliments.
But extemporizing lamely, she apologized for not having spotted his essay on Hawthorne in the recent Literary World. She had “known little of Literature,” she explained, “since my Father died—that and the passing of Mr Bowles, and Mother’s hopeless illness, overwhelmed my Moments, though your Pages and Shakespeare’s, like Ophir—remain.” His writing, staunch as the biblical city, might persist, but after the announcement of his impending marriage, it seems she considered him less accessible—even less dependable—than before. Certainly the frequency of her letters to him dropped precipitously, as if she no longer looked toward her Master Preceptor with the same confidence and hope, whatever hope there may have been, that he would stay true to her.
Yet she did not want to lose him entirely. When he mailed her a presentation copy of Short Studies of American Authors, she responded with typical humor, disingenuousness, and perspicacity: she knew too little of Poe’s work to judge Higginson’s assessment and noted that Mrs. Jackson “soars…lawfully,” the “lawfully” qualifying her praise. Circumspect about Howells and James, she observed, “one hesitates,” for she rightly inferred qualms about these two writers: “Your relentless Music dooms as it redeems.”
And if he delayed answering her, she still accosted him directly. “Must I lose the Friend that saved my Life, without inquiring why?” she asked with bite. “Affection gropes through Drifts of Awe—for his Tropic Door.”
But as far as we know she did not tell him that her affections had groped—and found—a different tropic door: she had fallen in love with her father’s best friend.
Such coincident occasions: as if she, forsaken by Higginson, had found Judge Otis Phillips Lord, whose wife had died shortly after Mary. Such symmetry: Higginson marries a much younger woman, very different from himself and from Dickinson; Dickinson, almost fifty, falls in love with a much older man, as if, in her case, she preferred her new Preceptor (she trotted out the word for Lord, too) more like her father in age and outlook than like Higginson. It is curious, suggestive, a mystery.
But Otis Lord himself is not mysterious. Born in 1812 in Ipswich and a graduate of Amherst College, class of 1832, Lord was a mainstay in college affairs and by the 1860s a frequent guest of its treasurer, Edward Dickinson. Earlier he had studied law in Springfield; attended Harvard Law School; served six terms in the Massachusetts General Court, five in the House of Representatives, and one in the Senate; currently he sat on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. From 1844 he resided in Salem with his wife, Elizabeth Farley Lord, whom he married the year before. They had no living children.
An accomplished orator, Lord was also a crusty conservative who did not exercise his eloquence, as had Wendell Phillips, on behalf of the slaves but treated their champions to his blistering scorn. Sue Dickinson vividly remembered how
Judge Lord never seemed to coalesce with these men, although he was often here with them…. But his individuality was so bristling, his conviction that he alone was the embodiment of the law, as given on Sinai so entire, his suspicion of all but himself, so deeply founded in the rock bed of old conservative Whig tenacities, not to say obstinacies, that he was rather so anxious an element to his hostess in a group of progressive and mellow although staunch men and women.
Judge Otis Lord. “Calvary and May wrestled in his Nature.”
Like his friend Edward Dickinson, he had scoffed at both the Free-Soil and the Know-Nothing parties and supported the antislavery Whigs insofar as their positions did not interfere with the Constitution or property rights. His opinions, tenaciously held, likely ended his political career, for as much as he was admired, he was also known as hotheaded, gruff, and arrogant—and, besides, old-time Whigs had virtually disappeared. After his death he was eulogized as “strong in his intellect, strong in his emotions, strong in his friendships, strong in his dislikes and prejudices, strong in thought, and strong in language, and, above all, strong in his integrity.” This, too, resembles Edward Dickinson. “Calvary and May wrestled in his Nature,” Dickinson would acutely characterize Lord, but she could have been speaking of her father.
Though formidable in the courtroom and ruthless at the bar, Lord reputedly was a decent, intelligent man with a taste for Shakespeare; after the death of his wife, he presented Emily with a concordance to the plays. And he and she exchanged vows of love, or so we imagine from the drafts and fragments of letters to Lord discovered among Dickinson’s papers.
Like the Master letters (which also exist only in drafts), these rock with passion, subtlety, and wit, and yet they, too, like the Master letters, tease the reader rather than illuminate the relationship between Dickinson and a man eighteen years her senior, or what she called “the trespass of my rustic Love upon your Realms of Ermine.” For again there is much we do not know: which of the drafted letters, never mind the scribbles on the insides of envelopes or on the back of pharmacy paper, ever reached Judge Lord in a final form; whether Dickinson seriously considered leaving the village of Amherst for the smokier city of Salem; or even when a family friendship warmed to passion, whether right after Mrs. Lord’s death or after Higginson’s marriage. “Yet Tenderness has not a Date—,” Dickinson reminds us, “it comes—and overwhelms—The time before it was—was naught, so why establish it? And all the time to come it is, which abrogates the time—.” In 1876 she had mentioned to Higginson that the judge had been with her a week in October—Mrs. Lord had been a witness to Dickinson’s will—and the following year she remarked, again to Higginson, that “Judge Lord was with us a few days since—and told me the Joy we most revere—we profane in taking.” That discloses little.
Nor do the drafts and scraps of love letters reveal whether Lord and Dickinson spoke of marriage, though it seems they did. On one note, penciled to him, she wrote, “Sweetest Name, but I know a sweeter—Emily Jumbo Lord—Have I your approval?” On another, she affectionately remarked, “You said with loved timidity in asking me to your dear Home, you would ‘try not to make it unpleasant’—So delicate a diffidence, how beautiful to see!”
That was in 1882, and by then they had composed their own lexicon of love, replete with various characters of innuendo: “That was a big—sweet Story—,” Dickinson teased, “the number of times that ‘Little Phil’ read his Letter, and the not so many, that Papa read his, but I am prepared for falsehood, on subjects of which we know nothing, or should I say Beings—is ‘Phil’ a ‘Being’ or a ‘Theme,’ we both believe and disbelieve a hundred times an Hour, which keeps Believing nimble—. ‘Phil’ have one opinion and Papa another—I thought the Rascals were inseparable.”
Yet someone—Austin or Lavinia?—took scissors to the love letters, snipping out sections but preserving enough for us to take notice of Dickinson’s ardor, ingenuity, and consummate style. “My lovely Salem smiles at me”—a picture he had given her?—“I seek his Face so often—but I have done with guises,” she writes. Was she saying she preferred his countenance in the flesh or that she no longer wished to hide her love of him from others? Or both: “I confess that I love him—I rejoice that I love him—I thank the maker of Heaven and Earth—that gave him to me to love—the exultation floods me. I cannot find my channel—the Creek turns sea—at thought of thee.” Unlike her poem to Higginson, in this case the Brook did come to the Sea.
In another draft of a letter, she recounts her nephew Ned asking if Judge Lord belonged to any church; she had said no, not technically. Ned replied, “‘Why, I thought he was one of those Boston Fellers who thought it the respectable thing to do.’ ‘I think he does nothing ostensible,’” she answered serenely. In that same letter, quoting the book of Revelation—and playing on the word “will” ( Judge Lord had likely helped draw up her will): “Don’t you know you have taken my will away and I ‘know not where’ you ‘have laid’ it? Should I have curbed you sooner? ‘Spare the “Nay” and spoil the child’?”
She played with poetry in her letters to Higginson, but with Lord she juggled legal terms—bankruptcy, penalty, warrant—with erotic zing. “To lie so near your longing—to touch it as I passed, for I am but a restive sleeper and often should journey from your Arms through the happy night,” she wrote, “but you will lift me back, wont you, for only there I ask to be.” Then again she would remind him, “Dont you know you are happiest while I withhold and not confer—dont you know that ‘No’ is the wildest word we consign to Language?” What had she refused him?
His letters arrived Mondays. “Tuesday is a deeply depressed Day—,” she scribbled on a scrap of paper; “it is not far enough from your dear note for the embryo of another to form…but when the Sun begins to turn the corner Thursday night—everything refreshes—the soft uplifting grows till by the time it is Sunday night, all my Life [cheek] is Fever with nearness to your blissful words [rippling words].” He came to visit, and when he left, she mused, “Were Departure Separation there would be neither Nature nor Art, for there would be no world.”
These tatters of passion reach us through Austin, who may have rescued them from Vinnie’s fire. Years later, when Mabel Loomis Todd was preparing a book of Dickinson’s letters, he presumably handed her an old brown envelope and with typical understatement said the contents were curious. Todd read the letters, stuffed them back into the envelope, and though she decided not to publish them, she did not give them back. Instead, she placed them under lock and key in a camphorwood chest containing other treasured Dickinson papers, and not until her daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham, published the slim blue-covered Emily Dickinson: A Revelation in 1954, a portrait of Lord as the frontispiece, were the contents of the envelope divulged.
Among the secrets never divulged are whether Judge Lord read or admired Dickinson’s poetry and whether she even showed it to him. Surely he was aware that her reputation had traveled beyond the Pelham Hills. In the summer of 1878, the Springfield Republican alleged that the undisclosed author of the popular stories by Saxe Holm was not, as supposed, Helen Hunt Jackson but an Amherst recluse with a connection to literature and flowers who, clad in white like Hawthorne’s Hilda, devoted her life to a single idea. Clearly the author of those stories saw into the heart of small spaces, and a subtle writer, which Jackson definitely was not, shunted not the world but its pain. Another paper, the Springfield Union, jumped on the speculating bandwagon and declared that the anonymous author had to be a Dickinson.
With brusque discourtesy, the Republican then denied its own allegation. “We can only say that we happen to know that no person by the name of Dickinson is in any way responsible for the Saxe Holm stories,” barked the editor, his voice sounding very much like Austin’s.
THE ELDEST OF FIVE SISTERS, Minnie Thacher was the niece of the first Mrs. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and, as Higginson observed, “an old-fashioned girl.” Shy and modest, she never wore a low-necked dress in her life, nor, thank goodness, had she bored holes in her ears to dangle rings from; rather, she was “exquisitely refined & dainty in all her ways,” Higginson bragged as if he had never cared a fig for women’s rights or their independence.
His family was speechless. Having assumed that if he remarried, he would naturally choose his bride from the ranks of the woman suffrage movement, they never imagined he might pluck her out of a bouquet of pastel Newport damsels. His friends were flabbergasted. To their uneasy inquiries, Higginson explained that he had no choice: home and family were his “only safety,” he had emphatically said. “I’m adrift in the universe without it.” Coming from the freedom fighter of yore, the admission was peculiar, but the man who feared drowning in a river of his own fancy needed to cling to a raft, pretty and predictable. Brittle are the piers.
The couple had met two years earlier in Newport, where Minnie had evidently stayed for a few days with the Higginsons, and Higginson courteously admired her prose sketches, Seashore and Prairie, mentioning them in The Woman’s Journal as exhibiting the “clear good-sense and…modest faithfulness” of their author. He divulged little else about the hasty courtship. Instead he circulated the compliments of friends polite enough to congratulate the couple: Celia Thaxter compared Minnie to Pallas Athene, and Louise Moulton said she was mayflowers and moonlight. Higginson shared the metaphors with Dickinson, who responded with a satiric laugh: “I shall pick ‘May flowers’ more furtively,” she said, “and feel new awe of ‘Moonlight.’”
A small wedding took place on the first of February, 1879, at the home of Minnie’s parents in West Newton. Samuel Longfellow, Higginson’s longtime friend from divinity school, presided, and the Harvard poet himself also joined the small group. Fit and dapper, Higginson stood next to his charming bride as if nothing had happened: not his dismissal from Newburyport almost thirty years earlier, not Thomas Sims or the Anthony Burns debacle, not Kansas, the war, South Carolina, emancipation: none of it.
Perhaps, then, it was to lay his past to rest that the newlyweds trekked south to Harpers Ferry for their honeymoon. Supposedly they went to meet Minnie’s relatives, but the real reason, at least for Higginson, was to walk among sites connected to bygone days: the small firehouse in the armory yard from which John Brown had shot at federal troops, the courthouse where he was tried, the jail yard where he was confined: ghostlike, all of it.
In Cambridge, though, he leaped into life. If rejected as an outsider in Newport, as he had believed, in Cambridge he was the Colonel, a local hero, popular and sought after. “I shall no doubt do something or other to dispel it before a great while,” he joked to a friend. Elected president of the Young Men’s Republican Club and appointed the governor’s chief of staff, he declined to run for mayor of Cambridge but did serve two years in the Massachusetts legislature, where he opposed compulsory Bible reading in public schools and supported abolishing the poll tax qualification to vote. He campaigned for woman suffrage and backed the establishment of Harvard Annex (later Radcliffe) so that young women could receive an education comparable to that of Harvard men. Maybe they’d enter Harvard itself someday. He hoped his daughter would.
That daughter, named Louisa for his mother and sister, was born in January 1880 and seven weeks later died of cerebral meningitis. The instant she heard, Dickinson contacted the bereaved father.
The Face in Evanescence lain
Is more distinct than our’s—
And our’s surrendered for it’s sake
As Capsules are for Flower’s—
Higginson answered her right away, and she wrote again. “Most of our Moments are Moments of Preface,” she instructed this Master with gentle pith. We begin; that is all. Signing her note “Your Scholar,” she did not tease him this time; his description of the infant Louisa had touched a chord, and just a few months later she was telling him about an Indian woman at her kitchen door, carrying baskets and a “dazzling Baby” that reminded her of the little girl she never met. If a gulf had opened between them, Higginson’s daughter temporarily bridged it.
And when another daughter, Margaret, was born to the Higginsons the following year, Dickinson congratulated the Colonel with unalloyed pleasure. “I know but little of Little Ones, but love them very softly—,” she said, welcoming this little one with a verse:
“Go traveling with us”!
Her Travels daily be
By routes of ecstasy
To Evening’s Sea—
And Higginson was ecstatic. Wheeling the baby carriage beneath the wide elms flanking his beloved Cambridge streets, he nabbed passersby to show off his achievement before trundling back home to the Queen Anne–style house, dark brown and all the rage, that he had built on Buckingham Street, between Mount Auburn Cemetery and Harvard College. It was the first house the Colonel ever owned, and as soon as it was finished, he placed an old brass knocker on the front door above the brass plate with “S. Higginson” engraved on it; both items were from the old house on Kirkland Street. But in the front hallway he hung something of his own: the sword decorated in the colors of his regiment that the freedmen of South Carolina had presented to him, with gratitude, before he left Beaufort.
Higginson home, Buckingham Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1880.
“It is such inexpressible happiness to have at last a permanent home,” he told his sister, echoing Emily, though in his case it was the return of the native, settled, after all these bleeding and peripatetic years.
IN AMHERST, DICKINSON herself had settled into a routine of passion and solicitude, sketching out love letters to her judge while tending her mother night and day, tirelessly soothing her, reading to her, fanning her in the heat, and lying to her in all weather about her condition. “The responsibility of Pathos is almost more than the responsibility of Care,” Emily told Elizabeth Holland. One day slid into another. “I hardly have said, ‘Good Morning, Mother,’ when I hear myself saying ‘Mother,—Good Night—.”
If Dickinson seemed happier, her romance with Lord was the likely reason—that and her having assumed a new authority at the Homestead. Relieved of her father’s stony frown, no matter how she loved it, and Mrs. Dickinson’s moralizing, Emily no longer had to fight for independence; now she just assumed it and wore it well. If she and Austin dared talk about the extension of consciousness after death, a subject their mother considered “very improper,” Dickinson airily quipped that her mother “forgets we are past ‘Correction in Righteousness.’” The children were adults, as if for the first time.
There were other indications of change, small but subtle: when asked, Dickinson offered to contribute three poems to a charity raising money for indigent children. Again she turned to Higginson. “I have promised three Hymns to a charity, but without your approval could not give them,” she said. This time she was not asking whether she should submit them or if he would reject the appeal on her behalf. She had already agreed to furnish the poems and wanted only to know if he thought them appropriate.
Happy to read her work and no doubt pleased, he replied quickly. “The thoughtfulness I may not accept is among my Balms—,” she thanked him, “Grateful for the kindness, I enclose those you allow, adding a fourth, lest one of them you might think profane—They are Christ’s Birthday—Cupid’s Sermon—A Humming-Bird—and My Country’s Wardrobe—Reprove them as your own.”
The most concise and visually fanciful poem of the lot, the hummingbird (“A Route of Evanescence”) proceeds from an absent center, around which Dickinson puts color in motion to mimic the fluttering of the tiny bird:
A Route of Evanescence
With a revolving Wheel—
A Resonance of Emerald,
A Rush of Cochineal
“My Country’s Wardrobe,” intended as an amusement, cheekily decks the nation in patriotic garb: “Her triple suit as sweet / As when ’twas cut at Lexington,” but “Christ’s Birthday” (“The Savior must have been”) tilts in a slightly different direction and is likely the poem she thought “profane,” with its conceit that the Savior is a “docile Gentleman” come far on a cold day—his birthday—to save his “little Fellow men.” (This poem was presumably sent to the Evergreens as accompaniment to an iced cake for Christmas.)
These light, droll, and charming poems differ sharply from “Mine Enemy is growing old” (“Cupid’s Sermon”). The most conspicuously personal of the lot, it mixes regret with advice, acceptance with rue, and neither mentions Cupid nor furnishes a sermon, at least not directly:
Mine Enemy is growing old—
I have at last Revenge—
The Palate of the Hate departs—
If any would avenge
Let him be quick—
the Viand flits—
It is a faded Meat—
Anger as soon as fed is dead—
’Tis Starving makes it fat—
Is “growing old” her enemy, or is her enemy growing old? As is often the case, Dickinson avoids a specific context; she will not staple her meaning down. The poem opens wide and burrows deep, touching the quick of our anger while distancing itself from the emotion it names. Its homiletic is an irony, and yet the poem is not ironic. And like much of her verse, it affords us the frisson of emotion before we are sure of what we experience. It speaks intimately, blasphemously, sensually even when we can’t quite parse her grammar.
As Higginson knew, her poetry is also a seduction: it dances before the reader, enticing the reader before darting away; it is dangerous, daring, dubious; it flaunts its independence from the habits of predictable reading. And it insists on itself—one is always glad one is oneself—with panache, concealing what it creates, creating what it conceals, both at the same time. The experience is explosively nonverbal.
In her room, on the backs of envelopes or on snippets of brown writing paper—the odds and ends of literary genius—Dickinson composed, a poseur deeply sincere, a consummate flirt, a sorceress, a prestidigitator in words soaring beyond the law. Candor is the only wile. Said the poet Allen Tate, Cotton Mather would have burned her as a witch.