Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [85]
Papa [another private name] has many Closets that Love has never ransacked. I do - do want you tenderly. The Air is soft as Italy, but when it touches me, I spurn it with a Sigh, because it is not you . . . Our life together was long forgiveness on your part toward me. The trespass of my rustic Love upon your Realms of Ermine, only a Sovereign could forgive . . . Oh, had I found it sooner! Yet Tenderness has not a Date - it comes - and overwhelms.
The question of marriage came up more seriously in November- December 1882, after Mrs Dickinson died. Eyeing Emily’s thinness, he teased her as ‘Emily Jumbo’ (the famous elephant, Jumbo, in Barnum’s circus had recently appeared near Amherst). She tossed the joke back.
‘Sweetest name, but I know a sweeter - Emily Jumbo Lord. Have I your approval?’
He assumed that she was now freed to live with him. He replied, ‘I will try not to make it unpleasant.’
She was touched that he could invite her into his ‘dear Home’ with ‘loved timidity’. Her answer, as often when she was moved, almost falls into verse.
‘So delicate a diffidence, how beautiful to see! I do not think a Girl extant has so divine a modesty. You even call me to your Breast with apology! Of what must my poor Heart be made?’
His delicacy made her reproach herself. He was the ‘tender Priest of Hope’, and his offer needed no further glow. Meanwhile, in the bitter cold of mid-winter, the love she felt must keep him ‘sweetly warm’, though she hoped he’d wear his furs as well. His love for her was ‘a treasure I still keep . . .’. Writing to each other, as was their custom, on a Sunday, she willingly transferred her worship. ‘While others go to Church, I go to mine, for are not you my Church, and have we not a Hymn that no one knows but us?’
Her ‘No’ to marriage was never final. She ‘lies near’ his ‘longing’; she ‘touches’ it, but then wills herself to move away. It would have been natural to hope that her condition would lessen as she grew older but she’d had a blackout, perhaps a seizure, in April 1881, brought on by the blaze of a fire in Phoenix Row, with a wind blowing the burning shingles. Afterwards she had lain on her pillow for more than a week, while Vinnie had closed her lips even to Loo and Fanny, who were familiar with ‘the cause’. When Emily was able to lift her head she apologised to them for Vinnie’s secrecy.
In the end she did not tell Lord why she could not ‘bless’ their union, only that not to do so ‘would be right’. To keep epilepsy the secret it had to be, she must remain at home as long as she lived. But she may have had other considerations as well: the incursions of the spirit are often associated with a particular place and Dickinson’s room may have been for her thus hallowed. All that’s certain is that she had to control the tie with Lord. The forgiveness she asks for refusing to consummate their union addresses a divine Spirit rather than a leader of men.
Was Lord vital to Dickinson or was he an aftermath to her soaring? Was this a comfort after her father’s death, the slow fading of her mother and the premature death of Samuel Bowles, at fifty-two, on 16 January 1878, a month after Mrs Lord died? It’s telling that Lord does not enter her poetry. From that point of view he was a latecomer, competent, humorous, honourable and devoted, who offers the woman - not the poet - a new drama. For the first time she experiences a man’s touch and re-experiences it at night in her imagination. Lying in the dark, she thinks of Lord’s need and goes to meet it with a readiness both like and unlike that of Daisy, an innocent, eager for a momentous experience, yet uneasy at the looming Man of Noon. At forty-seven, forty-eight, forty-nine