Lives Like Loaded Guns by Lyndall Gordon

Author:Lyndall Gordon
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.
Published: 2010-05-26T10:00:00+00:00

For Susan, Poems came as a shock. Here was Emily wrenched away and twisted into shape for publication. She and Mattie stopped speaking to Lavinia, who held up her head but was not impervious to the pain.

With Higginson, Sue restrained her shock. As the poet’s old friend, she took it upon herself to thank him ‘for her’ - for leading her in front of the curtain. Her criticism of the volume was measured and her claim undeniable.

‘I think this much is due myself - my life long intimacy with Emily - my equally long deep appreciation of her genius. I am told that Lavinia is saying that I refused to arrange [the poems]. Emily knows that is not true. You are generous enough to be patient with my exegesis even if tedious to you. “The Poems” will ever be to me marvellous whether in manuscript or type.’

The editors were unaware of letters containing letter-poems as great as any. Susan had intended to set poems in the biographical context of the prose, a plan informed by insider knowledge. Higginson proposed that Mrs Dickinson be at least consulted on future volumes. Todd had no such intention. Her rival had lost her chance to ‘unconquerable laziness’.

Susan fought back. Three months after Poems appeared, Susan selected a fair copy of a visionary poem, ‘Just lost, when I was saved’, from her private trove. On 8 February 1891 she sent it to William Hayes Ward of the New York Independent, with a further inducement: the manuscript might be kept by the editor’s sister for her autograph collection. Written at the start of Dickinson’s anni mirabiles, in the summer of 1860, it soars into a timeless region as later T. S. Eliot would speak of the wind from ‘beyond the world’. Eliot and Dickinson were both soaked in the Bible, where wind and breath are the same. Dickinson recalls how the ‘breath blew back’. She’s ‘as one returned’ to report the vision. Unlike poets bereft of vision (as Eliot feels in the aftermath of his ‘moment’), Dickinson is heartened by her proximity to Eternity, like a sailor on a voyage of discovery who comes back exulting in her proximity to the ‘secrets of “the Line”’. A metaphoric venture beyond the equator floats her towards lines she is to write as ‘Reporter’ of unknown modes of being. She speaks from the brink of immortality:

. . . Therefore, as one returned, I feel,

Odd secrets of ‘the Line’ to tell!

Some sailor skirting novel shores!

Some pale ‘Reporter’ from the awful doors

Before the Seal!

Far from feeling, as Eliot, cast off by the timeless into a ‘waste’ of time-bound routines, Dickinson looked to renewed proximity to the timeless realm:

Next time to stay!

Next time, the things to see

By ear unheard—

Unscrutinized by eye!

Next time to tarry

While Ages steal—

Tramp the slow Centuries

And the Cycles wheel!

It’s to Susan and no one else that the poet ‘reports’ this crossing of the ‘Line’: the ultimate frontier. So when Susan offered this poem for publication early in 1891 it was not only for others to read, but also a validation of her tie with the poet.

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