This Republic of Suffering [97]
In Amherst, Massachusetts, where she rarely left her father’s house, Emily Dickinson lived even more removed from the war than Melville. But she too displayed a sense of the ironic disjunction between reality and appearance, expectation and experience. “Could Prospect taste of Retrospect,” Emily Dickinson wrote at the end of the war, echoing the notion of dark enlightenment that structured Melville’s Battle-Pieces.
My Triumph lasted till the Drums
Had left the Dead alone
And then I dropped my Victory
And chastened stole along
To where the finished Faces
Conclusion turned on me
And then I hated Glory
And wished myself were They.
“A Bayonet’s contrition / Is nothing to the dead,” the poem ends. Conclusion repudiates anticipation; regret cannot recuperate what is “finished” and rendered irreversible—what in another poem she describes as the “Repealless—list” of the fallen. Dickinson decries the incommensurability of victory and its human cost. Sentenced, like Bierce, to both survivor’s guilt and survivor’s glory, she cannot escape either. Irony rests in death’s destruction of the innocence and ignorance of prospect, as well as in the very notion of loss itself as irremediable annihilation rather than the redemptive sacrifice of Christian promise.71
Emily Dickinson is renowned as a poet preoccupied with death. Yet curiously any relationship between her work and the Civil War was long rejected by most literary critics, even though she wrote almost half her oeuvre, at a rate of four poems a week, during those years. Dickinson has been portrayed as a recluse, closeted from the real world and its tribulations. But her work is filled with the language of battle—the very vocabulary of war that she would have encountered in the four newspapers regularly delivered to the Dickinson house. Campaigns, cannons, rifle balls, bullets, artillery, soldiers, ammunition, flags, bayonets, cavalry, drums, and trumpets are recurrent images in her poetry.72
During the second year of the war Dickinson began a correspondence that would prove one of the most important of her life, with a man she came to call her “preceptor,” Thomas Wentworth Higginson. She had inaugurated the exchange in response to an essay he published about aspiring writers in the Atlantic Monthly of April 1862. But Higginson was more than a man of letters. Long an abolitionist, he accepted command of a regiment of black soldiers and early in 1863 departed for South Carolina. Although she would not actually meet him until 1870, Dickinson feared the grief his loss in battle would bring. “Could you, with honor, avoid death, I entreat you, sir—It would bereave Your Gnome”73
Dickinson understood loss, for citizens of her tight-knit Massachusetts town had already been claimed by war. The death of Frazer Stearns, son of the Amherst College president, at New Berne, North Carolina, in March 1862 had cast the whole community into mourning. Emily described her brother Austin as “stunned completely” by the news of his friend’s demise. She had seen young Stearns ride through Amherst with his sword and comrades at his side, and now “crowds came to tell him goodnight, choirs sang to him, pastors told how brave he was…And the family bowed their heads, as the reed the wind shakes.” Her fears about Higginson’s fate grew out of very direct experience with war’s cost.74
Emily Dickinson may have been preoccupied with the theme of death well before the outbreak of conflict, but national conflagration gave her a new language and a new context in which to contemplate its meaning. In writing to Higginson of the war, she herself acknowledged that the loss of friends to death that struck “sharp and early” had created in her “a brittle love—of more alarm, than peace.” And she understood that war placed her own despair in a new relationship to the afflictions of others around her. “Sorrow seems more general than it did, and not the estate of a few persons, since the war began; and if the anguish of others helped one with one’s own, now would be many medicines.” War