SYLLABLES OF EMILY DICKINSON 87A Pit—but Heaven over it—
And Heaven beside, and Heaven abroad,
And yet a Pit—
With Heaven over it...
The depth is all my thought—That Pit would be mortal Earth, but again she refrains from labeling, and we ’re
drawn beyond our depth.
Reclusive and a spinster, as they say, but not sheltered, Emily Dickinson knew
death close up: women dying in childbirth, children from disease, Amherst ’s
casualties throughout Civil War. Yet 1862 drew more poems from her than any
other year. The general “anguish,” she said at the end of that year, increases
“what we have the power to be.”
Losses studded her days: friends and mentors, Sam Bowles, her mother, her
father, and painfullest of all, her eight-year-old nephew Gilbert. She wrote a
friend: “ ‘Open the Door, open the Door, they are waiting for me,’ was Gilbert ’s
sweet command in delirium. Whowere waiting for him, all we possess we would
give to know.” But “isthere more?” she added. “Then tell me its name!”
In illness Dickinson said, “I write in the midst of Sweet-Peas and by the side
of Orioles, and could put my Hand on a Butterfly, only he withdraws.” At her
death in May 1886, her sister-in-law Susan prepared the body for burial, putting
violets and a pink orchid at her throat and flowers and boughs over the white
coffin. An old family retainer remembers Emily’s funeral wish: “She asked to be
carried out the back door, around through the garden, through the opened barn
from front to back, and then through the grassy fields.” Through the garden,
through grassy fields, a little like the carriage in her best-known poem, “Because
I could not stop for Death”: “We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain.”
Passing fields of grain, yes. But gazing grain?