Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [17]
It was given to me by the Gods—
When I was a little Girl—
They give us Presents most—you know—
When we are new—and small.
I kept it in my Hand—
I never put it down—
I did not dare to eat—or sleep—
For fear it would be gone—
I heard such words as ‘Rich’—
When hurrying to school—
From lips at Corners of the Streets—
And wrestled with a smile.
Rich! ’Twas Myself—was rich—
To take the name of Gold—
And Gold to own—in solid Bars—
The Difference—made me bold—
We sense her breathing presence, especially in the spaced line ‘I did not dare to eat—or sleep—’, as though, with each dash, something nameless is breaking through the crust of words; as though language were a crater, unsafe and stirring. Emily Dickinson is telling us that she lived on the lip of this crater from childhood on, long before she began to preserve her poems.
The boldness of her early character solidifying around ‘it’ - childhood’s visionary gift - had little in common with the preacher, aloft in his pulpit, blighting children’s spirits with an avenging God and possible death that very night. Emily recalled that ‘no verse in the Bible has frightened me so much from a Child as “from him that hath not, shall be taken even that he hath.” Was it because its dark menace deepened our own Door?’ Her awareness of her home’s barricades against that encroaching and ever-visible ‘menace’ brought mortality home yet again, reinforced by the death of Aunt Lavinia’s eldest child, aged four, from the dread scarlet fever.
There were evening prayer meetings and in midwinter, when the snow was two to three feet deep, four weeks of protracted prayers imploring sinners to undergo a change of heart they called conversion. Sinners clumped through the snow at a time when there was no street lighting. For the farmers who stayed for afternoon service on Sundays there were circular seats about a red-hot stove and talk ‘in low sad tones. A meagre lunch would be drawn from large, yellow muffs, while small soap-stones, drawn also from muffs, were re-heated for the sleigh-drive home in the winter dusk.’
Emily was often excused from church on account of the cold. Once, when her father did command her attendance, she begged off until both were weary. Suddenly she disappeared and the family had to go without her. On their return they searched for her with increasing alarm. At last she was found rocking in a chair in the cellar.
When Emily was twelve Jane Humphrey, a younger sister of one of the teachers at Amherst Academy, arrived for a spell at the school. Jane stayed with the Dickinsons, and after she left Emily wrote to her: ‘what good times we used to have jumping into bed when you slept with me. I do wish you would come to Amherst and make me a great long visit’. And again: ‘I miss you more and more every day, in my study in play at home indeed every where I miss my beloved Jane - I wish you would write to me - I should think more of it than a mine of gold.’ It took courage to persist without winning a reply.
Emily found it even harder to give up on a group of five fourteen-yearolds, including Sabra Palmer, Harriet Merrill, Sarah Tracy, and Abby Wood, who had adored their teacher, ‘our dear Miss Adams’, for two happy terms in 1844. Miss Adams, aged thirty-three, was an experienced teacher who could meld girls into a group. As it happened, the ‘five’ dispersed (three left Amherst) and ties faded but, once more, Emily reached out through letters, reminding the others of bonds that continued to vibrate in her imagination.
At this point she initiated a practice that was to dominate her adult life as a writer: sending her work out to friends with a view to binding them to her as a circle of readers. An encouraging teacher like