The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson/Chapter 5
CHAPTER V
"THE END OF PEACE"
1853—55
While Emily was passing through the first quiet years between her school days and her momentous visit to Washington and Philadelphia, there were passages in several letters from her which revealed something of her inner experience.
It was just before her twentieth birthday that she wrote:
You and I have been strangely silent upon one topic, Susie. We have often touched upon it and as quickly fled away,—as children shut their eyes when the sun is too bright for them. I have always hoped to know if you had no dear fancy illumining all your life, no one of whom you murmured in the faithful ear of night, and at whose side you walked in fancy the livelong day. How dull our lives must seem to the bride and the plighted maiden,—whose days are fed with gold and who gather pearls of evening,—but to the wife, Susie,—sometimes the wife forgotten,—our lives perhaps seem dearer than all others in the world. You have seen flowers at morning satisfied with dew, and these same sweet blossoms at noon with their heads bowed in anguish before the mighty sun,—think you that thirsty blossoms will need nought but dew? No, they will cry for light and pine for the burning noon, though it scorches them, scathes them; they have got through with peace. They know that the sun of noon is mightier than the morning and their life is henceforth for him. Oh, Susie, it is dangerous and it is all too dear,—those simple trusting spirits and the spirits mightier we cannot resist! It does so rend me, the thought of it,—when it comes, that I tremble lest at some time I too am yielded up. You will forgive my amatory strain,—it has been a very long one.
She writes again in fun, with a touch of the same foreboding, however, "I miss the grasshoppers much—but suppose it is all for the best—I should become too much attached to a trotting world," betraying a poignant certainty of her own stifled capacity for life that persists like an organ note held down, torturing the silence with its insistence. Even from extreme youth her unconscious philosophy seems to have been one of renunciation before the temptation was presented; the fear of loving what she could not have driving her to self-imposed abnegations. As if she knew by intuition all the possible devastation of love as well as all the loneliness without it—she seems to have fled within herself like an eremite to his altar. A premonition of the beauty and mystery and power of living seems to have grappled with her—another angel wrestler without face or familiarity—and all but worsted her, before she was confronted by her own actual ordeal.
Every fatal possibility seems to have hovered about her, every small day been big with monstrous approachings. Her intimate letters at this time, too sacred for revealing, show her as one who fled from a suspected wonder lest seeing it she faint to possess it and be lost. She knew and trembled for her own guess at life—was loath to admit it, lest failing it she lose hold on all there was left. She put so much of her own supernatural imagination into a person or event or just the ordinary weather, that few if any other minds could have conceived the voltage of her impressions or reactions. To her the death of some nameless neighbor opened an abyss of conjecture; a sudden fire, though it might be only a small shed burning behind a yellow barn, set the elements loose and sent her off into the Book of Revelation and the Day of Judgment. A perfidy always distracted her, whether national or private—disloyalty she could never conceive or admit. As with Keats her "angel nerves" were ill adapted for any higher vibrations than the old house afforded with its safe routine, quite electric enough for her sensitive transmission.
Always, when a circus was to pass her window in the first grey dawn on its hooded way from town to town, she sat up all night to watch for it, thrilled by its wild vagrancy, its pathos, its utter sophistication: hungry for sensation, starving for a world she later shunned, with a vague dread of its haunting power over her. Characteristic of her shy hidden self is her explanation:
If the archangels veil their faces—
Sacred diffidence my own attitude.
And again:
Perhaps there is never quite the sorcery that it is to surmise—though the obligation to enchantment is always binding.
So the years following her South Hadley experiences passed externally uneventful, until in 1853 Emily spent a winter in Washington with her father, who was in Congress for two terms to serve a special cause, and not from personal political ambition. He took his family and they stayed at Willard's, where Emily was at once recognized as unique by men much her senior. Her father had misgivings as to her being willing to go, as already she shrank peculiarly from being away from home, but his wish seems to have inspired her. There are many tales of her repartee still remembered.
She is said to have astonished some of her father's friends by her insight into men and affairs, and created quite a sensation by her wit. One story of her, handed down in the family, was of her asking a prim old Chief Justice of the Supremest sort, when the plum pudding on fire was offered—"Oh, Sir, may one eat of hell fire with impunity here?" To Susan at home she writes, "Would you rather I would write you what I am doing here, or whom I am loving there?"
She was charmed by the sweet softness of the spring, soft as summer there—the darling maple trees in bloom and grass green in sunny places—and could hardly realize it was winter still at home. It makes the grass spring in her heart, she writes, and the linnet sing to know that one she loves is coming there, and for one look of this friend she would give all the pomp, the court, the etiquette of the world. She becomes perversely fixed in her own notion that those who are of the earth will not enter heaven. The jostle and turmoil and scramble confuse her. She met many people, and after the fashion of the day walked a long time up and down in the hall of the hotel with some of them in the evenings. She was excused from some of the gaiety on the plea of fatigue, but at that was far gayer than she had ever been before in her life. Her passivity to her father's wish comes out in a postscript to the effect:
We think we shall go to Philadelphia next week, though Father has not decided. Eliza writes every day and seems impatient to have us. I don't know how long we shall stay there or in New York. Father has not said.
It was on a visit to this same Eliza, in Philadelphia, that Emily met the fate she had instinctively shunned. Even now, after the many slow years she has been removed from us in the body, her spirit hinders the baring of that chapter in her life which has been so universally misunderstood, so stupidly if not wantonly misrepresented. All that ever was told was a confidence to her Sister Sue, sacredly guarded under all provocation till death united them—the confiding and the listening—in one abiding silence.
Certainly in that first witchery of an undreamed Southern springtime Emily was overtaken—doomed once and forever by her own heart. It was instantaneous, overwhelming, impossible. There is no doubt that two predestined souls were kept apart only by her high sense of duty, and the necessity for preserving love untarnished by the inevitable destruction of another woman's life.
Without stopping to look back, she fled to her own home for refuge—as a wild thing running from whatever it may be that pursues; but only a few days later Sister Sue looked up from her sewing to see Lavinia, pallid and breathless from running, who grasped her wrist with hurrying hand, urging: "Sue, come! That man is here!—Father and Mother are away, and I am afraid Emily will go away with him!" But the one word he implored, Emily would not say. Unable to endure his life under the old conditions, after a short time he left his profession and home and silently withdrew with his wife and an only child to a remote city, a continent's width remote, where echo at least could not mock him with its vain outcry: dying prematurely, the spell unbroken.
And Emily went on alone in the old house under the pines. On the wall of her own room hung a picture in a heavy oval frame of gold—unexplained. That was all, to the visible score. Only once is there any evidence of her breaking a silence like that of dead lips, when she inexplicably urges a friend to name a new little son by the name never like any other to her ears. And a little later she ends a note to the same mother, "Love for the child of the bravest name alive." Always afterward she called him so, whether the family adopted the suggestion or not, finding a strange little comfort, perhaps, in the mere naming of the name.
From this time on she clung more intensely to the tender shadows of her father's house. She still saw her friends and neighbors from time to time, but even then her life had begun to go on in hidden ways. "I am not at home," she often said; or, "When I was at home"—and only one faithful heart understood that love to her had been home for an instant, and that she lived in its remembrance, while her little form flitted tranquil through the sunny small industries of her day, until night gave her the right to watch with her flowers and liberated fancies. The dead of night and the closed door were ever to her synonyms of release.
Her father never opposed her slightest preference, and there was never the least recognition in the family of any lasting effect from the much-envied fatal sally into the great world beyond the purple rim of the home horizon. Whatever may in after years have been supposed or surmised was but the idle gossip of any country village provoked by any woman unmarried—especially a gifted girl like Emily Dickinson, whose family were so warmly included in all the society of her time. It was spoken of her father that to him compromise was disloyalty. One of her own sentences sums it all up for his daughter, "Alleviation of the irreparable degrades it." She was as truly a nun as any vowed celibate, but the altar she served was veiled from every eye save that of God.
Her becalmed days in the years immediately following found their best understanding and comfort in her brother's home across the lawn. To her Sister Sue she writes at this time:
I rise because the sun shines and sleep has done with me. I brush my hair and dress and wonder what I am and who made me so,—and then I help wash the breakfast cups, and—anon wash them again, and then 'tis afternoon and ladies call,—and evening and some members of another line come in to spend the hours, and then the day is done. And prithee what is life? The supper of the heart is when the guest is gone!
Another scrap at the same date runs:
The definition of beauty is that definition is none; of heaven easier, since heaven and He are One.
Again:
Susan—We both are women and there is a Will of God.
Could the dying confide Death, there would be no dead.
Wedlock is shyer than death.
Thank you for tenderness.
And during her first ecstasy of renunciation:
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 gives us Women
When two hold
Garnet to garnet,
Gold to gold—
Born—Bridalled—
Shrouded—
In a day
Tri-Victory—
"My Husband"
Women say
Stroking the melody.
Is this the way?
Emily
In her own words, Emily had "got through with peace."
And since there is no portrait of her, except one made from her child face in the group mentioned, and another of extreme youth rather too freely restored to give much idea of her, perhaps it would not be amiss to quote the likeness in words from the preface to the volume of her verse called "The Single Hound":
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She had a dramatic way of throwing up her hands at the climax of a story, or one of her own flashes. It was entirely spontaneous, her spirit seemed merely playing through her body as the aurora borealis through the darkness of a Summer night.
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