• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 783 0

forms of epilepsy, and the mild petit mal does not involve convulsions. Much depends on what region of the brain is affected, and where it spreads. If it’s the motor region at the top of the brain sufferers, like Ned, undergo the visible jolts we associate with the condition. The mildest manifestations are absences. A friend of Dickinson’s youth, Emily Fowler (later Mrs Ford), recalled that she dropped crockery. Plates and cups seemed to slide out of her hands and lay in pieces on the floor. The story was designed to bring out her eccentricity for, it was said, she hid the fragments in the fireplace behind a fireboard, forgetting they were bound to be discovered in winter. This memory is more important than Mrs Ford realised because it suggests absences, either accompanying the condition or the condition itself.

What’s clear, on the evidence of Dickinson’s writing and the sheer volume of her output, is that she coped inventively with gunshots from the brain into her body. In ‘My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—’, the ‘power to kill’ makes the gun a ‘deadly foe’, but since this gun outlives its Master it’s no ordinary gun. Can it be the poet’s art? By late 1863, when this poem was probably written, the poetic force is sure of itself, exultant when it dares to expose its ‘Vesuvian face’. To write this kind of poetry is a form of action, an act of pleasure ‘every time I speak for Him’ - ‘Him’ (the owner or Master) being the mortal self.

So it was that art and life converge at this point, when poetic immortality is certain. Poetry is not only celebrated for its explosiveness; it’s also the protective gun that guards the ‘head’ by night (art’s ability to protect against outbreaks of sickness), and this guardianship is preferable to the shared pillow of matrimony. By day this force roams the ‘Sovreign’ woods. It’s not reclusive, it’s adventurous; it ‘roams’, and its arena claims the same regal status Dickinson confers on her ‘Queen’ role in other poems. A poem like this outlives the body, though for obvious reasons the body, art’s vessel, must continue as long as it can. The poem itself has ‘no power to die’ - it’s an immortal power, wielded by a killer eye and thumb, that is the control art imposes on the ephemeral, the mortal, passing across its field of vision.

In this way, ‘My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—’ turns an explosive sickness, its recurrent dramas of ‘Revolver’ and ‘Gun’, into well-aimed art. I fit for them . . . The secret is on her lips or it’s kept like a bomb in her breast - a timebomb ticking softly in some of her poems, yet ‘calm’. Art is made at the interface of abandon and decorum: the abandon of mind and feeling under the control of form, a tight form like Dickinson’s four-line stanza, the beat of hymns thrumming in the veins of her forebears. Contained further in her own domestic order, propped up by her protective father and sister, Emily Dickinson saved herself from the anarchy of her condition and put it to use.

6

TELLING

The Dickinsons were not her readers. In his youth Austin had fancied himself a writer; Emily had seen he was not and changed the subject. He knew of her poems and sometimes when his wife read them aloud to visitors Austin must have been present, but he did not think her great. Austin was to be surprised by his sister’s fame.

Vinnie was not told of the manuscript booklets and sheets of poetry her sister was piling up in her chest of drawers. Though it was known in the household, and eventually in Amherst, that ‘Miss Emily’ wrote poems, the family, led by Mr Dickinson, would have regarded precarious health as the main fact in her life. That her poems did not interest her kin so long as she lived might have happened for ordinary reasons - familiarity, conventionality, or respect for reserve - but their incuriosity might also have been associated with their attitude to her condition: abnormal poetry born of an abnormality to be kept out of sight. What would the family have made of a poem about a sex change, an operation that must ‘rearrange’ a ‘Wife’s’ make-up?

Amputate my freckled