Further Poems of Emily Dickinson/Introduction

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When the little, unexplored package gave up these poems of Emily Dickinson which her sister, Lavinia, saw fit never to publish, it was for one breathless instant as if the bright apparition of Emily had returned to the old house, with the bees and birds still busy beneath her window, to salute us with her wings.

Many of the pages are difficult to read. Some of the writing is in the shy character of her girlish habit; others are so bold there are but two words on a line and in ink not yet faded.

There are poems of each variety she made her own. They flash, they are droll, they are Nature speaking aloud, they tell the love she glorified in so direct and intimate a way that this may have been the reason they were withheld; and there are also a number of her metaphysical poems which her "Sister Sue" recognized from the first as her claim to genius.

It is possible that these were intended for another volume in the series already published. It is certain that to destroy them would be heresy to the faith of her following.

It is almost a hundred years since the birth of Emily Dickinson in 1830, and she herself said:

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Yet in her own case it has not proved so. She has not been left behind; and in an age that outgrows everything in faith or fashion Emily is yet to be overtaken. There seems to be in her something of what she calls

But Emily may be said to have accomplished death without loss of life, and to have become the incarnation of her own poem:

Emily was a universal creature, her mind always tuned for a dash to any pole, her raids on truth directed by her own premonitions,—a "Fellow of the Royal Infinity" perhaps, like her own "Pine Tree."

​Yet there have been critics, souls even, one rejoices not to say priests, disturbed by her irreverence. It has also been said that her letters and conversation were salted with the Bible and its characters with a spontaneous directness that would have delighted St. Francis of Assisi as much as it would have desolated Cotton Mather. But the religious naïveté of her environment must be suggested in extenuation,—the Calvinistic rigidity of precise definition so antagonistic to her intuition of the unknown.

It is in this mood of exasperation that she asks:

If she appeared to take liberties with her own relation to her religious training it was probably because she often felt nearer of kin to her Father in Heaven than her New England father on earth. Her spirit approached the Unseen with more assurance in the range of the immaterial and boundless by some subtle bond that saved her from fear, until she was snatched back again by the force of instilled temerity.

She says she often felt "God must be lonesome in dreary highness, up above flower or cloud or star"; and when in one rebellious outburst she cries:

​it is an Emily oppressed by the loss of perspective on her dear familiar, the foreseeing herself projected into a spacious prominence abhorrent to her.

The more she braves it out, as in the poem:

the more she trembles beneath her little dimity apron lest after all "God turn and look at me." For being Puritan born and bent, the Judgment Day, though less imminent, was no less due than Cattle Show or Commencement.

In her outbreak over the injustice done to Moses:

and further on where she speaks of

she is not really calling her Creator a bully, she is only "Emily outraged" again, as when we ran to her with our childish tales of injustice.

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is not literary extravaganza. Emily meant it. She too had known a Paradise withdrawn, such as Dante never conceived.

Never was she more in earnest than when she cried:

Here she is venting what she calls "the smart misery of life."

She must be taken in all sincerity, if at all. If she begins a poem in startling fashion:

the last verse carries this supreme conclusion:

To one who knew Emily in life, she was a denizen of awe. "Areas of the supernatural she recognized about her." In her poem: ​

she is merely for the moment in the greenroom, behind the scenes of creation, and, taking her Maker on equal terms, relating it from that point of view.

She did profess the Devil as the best of friends, if "he could be amended", so that his ability became "durably divine", thereby ranging herself alone against the condemning trio,—Milton, Dante and Goethe.

She never glossed over her own stark need to know, yet her real reverence is not alien to that of the Psalmist David, the Prophet Isaiah, or that shrewdest of them all, the Paradoxer of Ecclesiastes. Something of those dramatic Old Testament maidens was inherent in her likewise. She would have hidden Moses, gone to her king with the demure mien of Esther, exulted full stride with Miriam, and oh! most surely have let down that red thread with Rahab from sheer love of mystery and a sign. The devotion of Ruth was hers also, and later in life the quality of the inconsolable Rachel.

It is a misdemeanor to chide Emily for irreverence.

Only picture her drooping away from her dear pastor on that week-day summer afternoon, under his urgent invitation to conviction of sin and a policy of speedy reconciliation with her Maker, while her will was adamant to resist such blasphemy against her own ideas of Love and Life. Wide allowance he ​made for her, somewhat abashed by her shining ignorance as she denied being party to any quarrel with what had made her, or any need of any one to make it up for her. Honor to him that he informed her father she seemed exceptional to the rules of the technique of regeneration as commonly practised.

No, Emily could not be made to have faith. Her alert curiosity could not be drugged into it by dogma. Nor could she be watched in her soul's most holy offices.

As she herself expressed it:

Quales, Blake, Jonathan Edwards strove in her make-up, and each won out at intervals in her writing. The way she bares being without subterfuge is like nothing but the primitives on the cloister wall. She pretends nothing, disdains posture calculated to throw any one subtlety into high relief or out of true focus. It is all laid down without a superfluous gesture. She leaves it there, without rounding it out; and the flat fact is oftenest on a spiritual dead gold, underlaid with sheer simplicity, as seen by the frank stare of a child.

Emily's affair with words was her own. She read the dictionary as the rest of her family read the newspaper for the latest news, but no one ever saw her ​consult it. It was magic to her, not a spelling book; and as some one has said, "there is an absolute lack of studio finish in her work."

Of all beings she was the most tacit. Speaking of summer's grace striving with her for notice she says:

Nothing was ever short enough for her. Yet she was always so hurried that of the endless New England winter she declares:

and her sister Lavinia heard her repeated murmur in her later years, "Oh, Vinnie, my work, my work!" and was at loss to understand. For, though Emily relied on Lavinia for the stability of her universe, she did not confide in her.

Her spontaneity in words pried under accepted usage or set fire to it. She speaks of "the Sun, busy with majesty", and of a day after a tragedy that "unrolled as huge as yesterdays in pairs." She casually alludes to God as "vouching with hyperbolic archness"; and who else ever began so lusty a line for the dead as: ​

Purple ribaldry—a revel it must have been to her when that adjective caught her.

In an exhaustive review of her in the Revue des Deux Mondes entitled "La Vie Secrète d'Une Puritaine, Emily Dickinson," it is exciting to see how she sparkles in the exact language of science and court, which adds a cutting to her gems that leaves our blunter English dim by comparison.

Metaphor is her characteristic figure, of course, and it could never be too terse for her liking; for which reason some of her admirers who are Oriental scholars long to see her consummate in the concentrated and permanent forms of the Chinese. Her letters are the record of her external life, her poems the journal of her mind and soul—where they went—what happened to them.

She has been given a wide range of labels by her reviewers, from the "Modern Sappho" to a "Hermit Thrush"; from a "New England Nun" to "an Epigrammatic Walt Whitman." One Reverend Father of a most holy Order declares: "Emily is Malchizedeck, without father, without mother, without descent; having neither beginning nor end of life; born not after the law of carnal commandment but after the power of an endless life."

​Yet to one who saw Emily "plain"—

and escaping their verbal nets, light laughs Emily at all efforts to enmesh her.

There has been undue stress laid upon her avoidance of what Emerson calls "those devastators of the day." She was never wantonly a recluse, nor did she know she was one. She ran from people because time was precious and the Declaration of Independence promised her the right to happiness where and how she found it. How well her sister Lavinia knew it was no renunciation to fly many of the situations she faced in Emily's stead. Emily's poems came and she let them in, while Lavinia, hearing a knock, opened the door to "traffic with a berry woman."

The world Emily was running from was not the world of now. It was a small country village "drifted deep in Parian" all the slow winter long, a small country village all the dusty summer through—with its births and deaths, spites, ministerial taking-sides, early tea parties, religious revivals in season, or the panic of unexpected relatives driving up for uninvited visits. All of which became empty or arduous beside that inner society peopled by the Brownings, "Immortality", "Eternity", the Brontës and all the rest of her intimates.

Always those three Brontë girls were most her own kin. The desolation of their grim Haworth ​rectory howled over by distracted winds makes Emily's form of exclusive solitude seem cosmopolitan. As one of her English critics said, "she built her world of treasures and familiar things within. She never adjusted herself to her world—she moved to a brilliant and subtle solitude leagues within—without shrinkage, rather with increase of her mental powers."

Had a career been open to Emily she would never have fluttered far from the doorway of the old place that cherished her. She was mentally free to the quiet necessary for her thought. That was the freedom she craved.

she says.

Nor could there be a gentler illustration of her inborn modesty than her little way of putting in "My Sister Sue^[1] said—" before some blinding flash of her own, which never deceived Sister Sue when quoted back at her by the dazzled hearer.

In their day, to teach or to marry was the only question. Of one Emily seems never to have dreamed; of the other to have dreamed only.

To her Sister Sue she gave that "love which is the passionate art of sharing", but the protection of her home where all drew a charmed circle about her was a dominant element in her result. There, of every shade in Nature she was

​There her ears caught those

There, ofttimes "among her mind" such glee possessed her she vows had she but ballet knowledge she would put herself abroad

Again her mental exercise took a colder shade, and she says:

It was there she became conscious in her chamber of a "Shapeless Friend." It was there she

The love poems as given here form an almost unbroken narrative of Emily's own experience, from the first sight of the man she heard as a stranger preaching in Philadelphia, on through their mutual bewilderment, certainty, and renunciation.

Without a doubt their first recognition is recorded by her in an otherwise rather insignificant poem sent to her Sister Sue a little later: ​

Hitherto the bread of life had been broken for Emily by aged hands. She had associated public worship with all that was most depressing, painstakingly pointed out in its loneliest light as a remote means of escape from the Judgment Day. Was it strange that from the first moment she was won by a young heart kindling the Light of the World before her seeking eyes?

She heard the stranger more than once before they met and spoke together, speculators both in those conjectures of the Spirit toward which she was temperamentally predisposed. He was young, full of the grace of youth as well as the grace of God; the power of conviction and eagerness was his also. His preaching must have been for her the original of her later lines to her nephew:

It certainly captivated Emily, nor did it condemn; for it was held by her Sister Lavinia as well as her ​Sister Sue that Emily was the one who resisted—when his own ties of home and pulpit were mentally lost down the winds under the spell she cast over him.

As one of her devoted advocates has written me, "Emily grew her vision standing for the truth as God gave her to see it. For this she withstood volcanic passion. With every impulse to go to hell, with the whole lineage of martyrs to passion sanctioning it, from Sappho to Byron, she just didn't. Sappho became Puritan."

Emily herself says:

She glorified her Elect and felt herself glorified in him. It is due in some part to his persuasive and brilliant ministry that her poems more often than not concern themselves with immortality and have a tendency toward heaven in the last line. After his death she was more than ever permeated by the Unseen, which was almost an actual presence with her at times.

All her life through there were men of distinguished attainment who sought her for her peculiar fascination and continued to come to the very end to hear her talk and to meet her high demand for their own conclusions, as best they might. But one only dominated her. To Emily All had no codicil. ​

expressed it for her.

she discovers later, as also that piercing truth,

One of her "transporting aims" she tells in:

In their earlier days she was often playful, always rapt in her approach, whether she tended her flowers for him, her "Bright Absentee", or shivered before Love's "Alpine requirements", or offered her

for a sight of his face,—or, baffled in trying to say how much she loves, begs the question with

She declares, "He taught me waiting by myself", "Fortitude of Fate", "Altitude of Death"; yet it was "Joy to have merited the pain!" She says:

​which lays bare the hidden meaning of her soft, repeated "I am not at home now", or "When I was at home", spoken of in her Life and Letters.

As the years went on, what had been voluntary renunciation passed by cold gradations into what she called "a threadless way" through which she "pushed mechanic feet"; while more closely she identified love and death in eternity, until her love poems and death poems were almost inextricably one, leading up to the climax of that poem beginning:

where "with miracle behind her and miracle before" she passes "from midnight into victory" with her undaunted words:

For Emily—