"And you read your Emily Dickinson"

Poems whose freshness can still evoke in us a fine surprise.

A daguerreotype of Emily Dickinson from 1848 when she was 18 years old

“And you read your Emily Dickinson and I my Robert Frost” is a lyric from a Simon & Garfunkel song.

Well, I’ve read both these poets, although not religiously, and have quoted them in my assorted writings. I may have even quoted them in younger years to some unsuspecting bar patron I was sharing a conversation with. Well, actually, I was more apt to recite the opening lines of T.S. Elliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” or one of Shakespeare’s stanzas when the spirit (or spirits) moved me, although I may have slipped in “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood” or “Because I could not stop for Death—He stopped for me.”

I first was exposed to Frost as a young admirer of John F. Kennedy who would use the lines “The woods are lovely, dark and deep…” to end his speeches. He had invited Frost, a fellow New Englander, to speak at his Presidential Inauguration Ceremony in 1961. The aging poet, with a mane of white hair and a craggy face resembling the granite outcrops of his home territory, famously was unable to read the words of the poem he had composed for the occasion due to the glare from the sun on the page. Instead he offered the words of another “The Gift Outright,” spoken from memory.

I’m not sure when I first stumbled across Dickinson. Probably in the anthology I purchased for my American Thought & Language class at Michigan State University in 1969-70—The American Literary Record, which I still have.

A greater interest was piqued when I read the epigraph that Tennessee Williams used in the written version of his play Night of the Iguana.

And so, as Kinsmen, met a Night —
We talked between the Rooms —
Until the Moss had reached our lips —
And covered up — our names—

Readers of this website might recognize that I used these lines for a fictional vignette I published on this site a number of months ago.

In the anthology, the section of Dickinson appears at the front of the second volume, right after Walt Whitman, another poet extraordinaire, while Frost’s turn comes several writers later. This is due to their being a generation apart, with Dickinson being born in 1830 and dying in 1886 at age 56, and Frost having the birth year of 1874.

In between them were such luminaries at Mark Twain, Henry James, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Stephen Crane.

Her appearance that early in the line-up is strictly due to when she was born and an acknowledgement that it was during those years of the mid-19^th century— before, during and after the Civil War—when she wrote her multitude of poems as well as letters at her home in Amherst, Massachusetts.

‘Reclusive’ is the word most often used in any biography or discussion of Dickinson, with the caveat offered that she wrote in obscurity and even in secrecy. It was not until after her death that a number of her poems were published, thanks to her sister Lavinia who discovered the literary treasure assumedly tucked away in a desk drawer or packed in a storage box.

 As it’s been described, there were “hundreds of short lyrics in all, each an entry in her ongoing ‘letter to the world.’ Samplings of them were published in 1890, 1891, and 1896. These books, it was noted in The Literary Record “brought a considerable, though temporary interest in her name.” Her place in the American Canon came later, in the 1920s, “as a result of the publication by her niece, the only surviving member of the family, of new poems and letters and of significant biography material.”

Some of her background, gleaned from the Biography website, noted that “Her family had deep roots in New England. Her paternal grandfather, Samuel Dickinson, was well known as the founder of Amherst College. Her father worked at Amherst and served as a state legislator.

“An excellent student, Dickinson was educated at Amherst Academy (now Amherst College) for seven years and then attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary for a year. Though the precise reasons for Dickinson's final departure from the academy in 1848 are unknown; theories offered say that her fragile emotional state may have played a role and/or that her father decided to pull her from the school. Dickinson (also) ultimately never joined a particular church or denomination, steadfastly going against the religious norms of the time.”

During her young adulthood, she formed friendships with both men and women, including two literary men. She would sent one them a handful of poems in 1862 “to ask him whether her verse was alive.” Although her writing was not known to the larger public, it was noted that “Friends in Amherst were honored with her delicately penned verse sent with gift of flowers or newly baked bread and wisely cherished them,” while her sister-in-law Sue receiving hundreds of these poetical missives.”

With her father being a man of eminence in the community, the home hosted numerous people, serving as a social center. Presumably, she interacted with others at these gatherings. She also kept up an active correspondence.

Dickinson, however, did spend her entire life at the family home, growing up there, attending school, and then (along with her sister) caring for their ailing mother. Neither she nor her sister married, although later biographers have speculated about possible romantic interests (either shared or only in her mind). Along with writing, she had an interest in botany and produced a vast herbarium.

But for whatever reason or cause, she became increasingly reclusive in the final 25 years of  her life, withdrawing from the social life of the town and then retreating to another part of the house when callers came and, finally, rarely leaving her home. It was only her family and a few friends “who knew how to pass the barrier.”

But she did not abandon her writing, although some of it we now know was not the type you’d send with a personal gift or was it in the popular vein of that time. Still, as The Literary Record stated “… she was in touch with the currents of thought of the age.”

This biographical report, in discussing her poetry, noted “One can find few poets who have accomplished so much with so few tools.”

“Confining herself almost entirely to the meters of the hymn tunes of her childhood, she made out of her acquaintance with nature, from a love affair lived only the imagination, and from her imitations of immorality, nearly eighteen hundred poems, whose freshness can still evoke in us a fine surprise.”

So here are a couple of my favorites:

Because I could not stop for Death

Because I could not stop for Death –

He kindly stopped for me –

The Carriage held but just Ourselves –

And Immortality.

We slowly drove – He knew no haste

And I had put away

My labor and my leisure too,

For His Civility –

We passed the School, where Children strove

At Recess – in the Ring –

We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –

We passed the Setting Sun –

Or rather – He passed Us –

The Dews drew quivering and Chill –

For only Gossamer, my Gown –

My Tippet – only Tulle –

We paused before a House that seemed

A Swelling of the Ground –

The Roof was scarcely visible –

The Cornice – in the Ground –

Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet

Feels shorter than the Day

I first surmised the Horses' Heads

Were toward Eternity –

The Bustle of a House

The Bustle in a House

The Morning after Death

Is solemnest of industries

Enacted opon Earth –

The Sweeping up the Heart

And putting Love away

We shall not want to use again

Until Eternity –

* * *

Steve Horton is a mid-Michigan journalist and commentator.