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Her main occupation, of course, was her work, starting before dawn. One poem ‘The Birds begun at Four o’clock’ celebrates the ‘multiplicity’ of their music when there’s no one to hear: ‘The Listener—was not—’. Patently untrue, because the poet, singing at the same hour, is awake and present. Nor was it true that her voice had no audience, her poems ephemeral as birdsong. She ensured that five to six hundred fair copies were entrusted to her friends and, as a further precaution, half of her poems (presumably those she most wished to preserve) were in hand-sewn manuscript booklets tucked away at home, which would sing, she knew, in time to come.

By six o’clock the dawn chorus is over; the ‘Band’ has gone; the sun rises; day takes over. The poet, the unmentioned witness, is left to balance loss and achievement. This she does with perfect equanimity, closing with a neat full stop:

The Miracle that introduced

Forgotten, as fulfilled.

She tells us, generations on, exactly what we want to know: the Miracle of composition overrode public obliteration during her lifetime. Composition was not only an end in itself; it was an ‘Extasy’:

Nor was it for applause --

That I could ascertain --

But independent Extasy

Of Universe, and Men—

7

ROMANCING JUDGE LORD

With no warning, Mr Dickinson, aged seventy-two, died on 16 June 1874. He was stressed at the time. As the years passed he had not managed to repay what he had borrowed from the inheritance of his wards who had lived at The Evergreens. This pressed upon him in 1874 when Anna Newman, the youngest, married. Then too his accounts as Treasurer of Amherst College had been in disarray when he resigned in 1872, a repeat of the unhappy situation of his own father, who had then left town. Samuel Dickinson had died far from family and all he held dear. Edward Dickinson too was away from home, serving in the Massachusetts legislature, when his heart stopped.

His last letter from Boston had been written in his dry lawyer’s voice:

June 8.74

Dear Family,

The day is extremely hot - I came down from the House, about 5 o’clock, & found Louisa & Fanny . . . at the ‘Tremont House’ [hotel] . . . Nothing more to-night.

Yours affy,

E. Dickinson

Crowds came through the gate of the Homestead for the funeral: all the worthies of Amherst, fellow members of the legislature and the senators for Hampshire County and Sunderland. An overflow from the house sat on chairs and sofas on the lawn. The coffin was open and a reporter (probably Bowles, who saw Emily for the first time in twelve years) observed that Mr Dickinson looked ‘as self-reliant and unsubdued as in life’. A wreath of white daisies from the Dickinson meadow were the only flowers allowed.

The Revd Mr Jenkins read from the first book of Samuel: ‘Samuel died, and all the Israelites were gathered together and lamented him, and buried him in his house at Ramah.’ Like the high priest, Mr Dickinson had administered justice and maintained integrity in his position as ‘Father to Amherst’. His alarming manner, the minister went on, had concealed a ‘hidden gentleness’. It was ‘not a gentleness that expended itself in pleasant speeches and manners assumed for effect, but a gentleness that felt others’ pains and losses, and exerted efforts for relief’. The Puritan in him, simple, stern, had abjured sentiment, while delicacy concealed choice feelings. Unconventional in his faith, not caring for ceremony and doctrine, Mr Dickinson had been (in his own words) ‘melted to tears’ at the remembrance of his conversion: ‘what we saw and felt of the working of God’s spirit among us in 1850’.

The sermon ended with a warning to survivors: ‘A great burden which strong shoulders have borne hitherto is rolled upon us . . .’.

Shaken, unprepared, Emily remembered that the day before her father left for Boston she had wanted to spend time with him, and as the afternoon stretched out he had said, ‘I would like it to not end.’ She still heard his voice at prayers. ‘I say unto you,’ he would