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By Root 574 0

at the ready: ‘I speak for Him—’. The pleasure of speaking is like a volcanic eruption; at such times the speaker shows ‘a Vesuvian face’. Although Dickinson seems to speak as a lone voice, lava and fire were political currency for activists of her generation. One of the first French cartoons of feminists in 1848 shows armed women erupting from a volcano, while a group of young women workers unfurl a banner naming themselves the Vésuviennes (women of Vesuvius). Dickinson’s usage is at the contemporary cutting edge, in the American context of Emerson’s individualism which sanctions lawlessness in so far as others are less real than the self: ‘No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.’ Thus Emerson. Thus Dickinson in her frenzy. Her force is formidable, unswerving.

The poem makes sense if the shot or lava stands for the poet’s emotional and verbal utterance. ‘She felt a dangerous power inside her,’ the critic Christopher Benfey saw, ‘a great unleashing of the imagination that filled her with mingled power and dread.’ Operating at the edge of existence, it’s to be a life of extremes, given entire to a ‘Master’ who deals out our inescapable mortality. Her gun may be less enigmatic in the light of this letter she wrote at nineteen, soon after the bullying she had endured at Holyoke. Her ordeal had been sanctioned by her praying relatives in Monson whose spy had been planted in the privacy of her bedroom. Had she reason to hate her uncle in particular, beyond a broken promise to keep in touch following his visit? Or was she projecting onto his departure her loss of Ben Newton - could Newton have been more important to her than we can know?

None of the correspondence with Ben Newton survives. What does survive is an extraordinary confidence in a letter to Jane Humphrey in April 1850, intimating a heaven-sent ‘joy’:

I have dared to do strange things - bold things, and have asked no advice from any - I have heeded beautiful tempters, and do not think I am wrong . . . Oh Jennie, it would relieve me to tell you all . . . and confess what you only shall know, an experience bitter, and sweet, but the sweet did so beguile me - and life has had an aim, and the world has been too precious for your poor - and striving sister! . . . Nobody thinks of the joy, nobody guesses it, to all appearance old things are engrossing, and new ones are not revealed, but there now is nothing old, things are budding, and springing, and singing . . .

Throughout Emily Dickinson’s poetry there are hints of a secret, a transforming experience connected to heaven - whatever heaven meant to her which she won’t or can’t articulate. Here is evidence of something ‘new’ and so momentous during the winter-spring of 1850 that it gave a purpose to her life. This semi-confession is a test for Jane, whose warm heart she has felt ‘beating near me’ with ‘music in its quiet ticking’. Emily’s alternating outbursts and sealed lips jolt Jane, as she would jolt later correspondents, alerting them to the limitations of language as verbal consensus. Would Jane respond to this alert?

Emily knew that Jane’s father was dying when she teased her with this confidence and, as it happened, he died that very day. Emily opens with cursory attention to Jane’s grief together with a tight-lipped excuse for not coming to Jane’s side - not ‘permitted now’ - but Emily’s chief focus is her own rarer drama, to which Jane is to be admitted in a helpmeet role as ‘my friend . . . my rock, and strong assister!’

A warning closes the letter: Jane should not be tempted to think she can get away. She won’t be permitted to bury her past with the Dickinson sisters as she might more ordinary folk: ‘Dont put us in narrow graves - we shall certainly rise if you do, and scare you most prodigiously, and carry you off perhaps!’

A month passed and Jane did not answer. From now on she kept clear of Emily Dickinson. Nor did she take up the challenge of interpretation.

So, what do we make of Emily’s secret? There’s an afterthought to Jane - another hint, harking back to a young man called James Kimball.