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By Root 623 0

Mack, who had bought half the Dickinson Homestead in 1833 and then the other half in 1840, died in November 1854. This had far-reaching consequences for the Dickinsons and, ultimately, for Austin’s fiancée. In April 1855 the Homestead came on the market and Mr Dickinson bought it back for $6000 (helped, it’s thought, by Mrs Dickinson’s recent inheritance from her wealthy father). In the grounds adjacent to the Homestead stood a remnant of an old dwelling with low ceilings and rough floor. Mr Dickinson now made two proposals to his son: he offered to build Austin and his bride a next-door house that would incorporate the remnant as their kitchen and dining room. At the same time Mr Dickinson, who had recently lost an election and would not be returning to Congress, offered Austin a partnership in his local law firm. So ended the plan to settle near Sue’s brothers. She was to live next door, as part of an extended Dickinson family. To allow for renovations and building, the wedding was postponed once more.

In November 1855 the Dickinsons moved into the Homestead. It was only a walk around the corner to where Emily had lived before she was ten, but she felt like an immigrant trundling out west in a wagon: a ‘gone-to-Kansas ’ sensation. Humorously she pictures herself with a lantern, looking for ‘deathless me’. Mrs Dickinson, however, was depressed. One possible cause was grief for her father; another, the loss of a home she’d made her own; and then, too, there was the probable use of her inheritance for what her husband wanted. There’s a hint of the sick passivity of a wife overruled. She lay on the sofa while Emily and Vinnie took control. In fact they found the house in fine condition, thanks to Mr Dickinson’s up-to-date improvements. In the front parlour he had put in French windows opening onto a veranda to catch the afternoon sun. Directly above, Emily had a corner room filled with light from four windows and heated by the latest Franklin stove, a novelty that put fireplaces out of fashion. From one set of windows, at the front of the house, she had an uninterrupted view of the Dickinson meadow or, looking down, of passers-by along Main Street. From the side set of windows she looked out on the groundwork and rising front tower of the house for Sue and her brother. Here, in a room of her own, Emily read her letters in private and wrote at her cherry table, only seventeen and a half inches square - sometimes on Sundays while the rest of the family went to church. She was excused (for unspecified reasons of health) any time she chose, and she exercised this liberty at will. Many of her letters comment on her lifting spirits in the stillness of the emptied house with no company but ‘Pussy’. Her best companion, she remarked, was her lexicon.

At some point it became her habit to start writing at three in the morning. The invisibility of the night set her free. ‘My Wheel is in the dark’, she begins one poem. She can’t see the spokes of the wheel, but knows its ‘dripping feet’ (the feet of the rhythmic line) go round and round, with the poet’s foot ‘on the tide’ - the tide of words and metaphors: the dark, the wheel, and the ‘unfrequented road’ to an imagined ‘Clearing’. Is ‘Clearing’ the clarification at the end of her poems? In this instance it’s also an end point in her poetic journey. En route she sees ahead some who give up (‘Some have resigned the Loom’); some whose spirit dies; and the enviable few who proceed to immortality. Their ‘stately feet’ (no longer ‘dripping’) pass ‘royal’ through the gate of the immortals, and in doing so they act on the strugglers they leave behind, ‘flinging the problem back, at you and I’. You and I may well be Sue and Emily, for Emily sent this poem to Sue, yet it speaks more widely to the challenge of imaginative endeavour: how to lift work in the direction of the ‘royals’.

So, equipped with lamp, book and little else, Dickinson picks up her pen and, as she puts it to paper, a fund of phrases falls to her. The confidentiality of this windfall is part of its appeal. Her ‘Banker’ is a divine