75“Earth’s most graphic transaction”
Syllables of Emily Dickinson
f I read a book and it makes my whole
body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know thatis poetry. If I feel physically
as if the top of my head were taken off, I know thatis poetry. These are the only
way I know it. Is there any other way.” This is the “Belle of Amherst,” as she
once jokingly called herself, Emily Dickinson (1830–1886), writing to Thomas
Wentworth Higginson, man of letters, former Unitarian minister, champion
of women’s rights, gun-running abolitionist who’d led the Union Army’s first
Negro regiment. After meeting the poet, the Civil War hero told his wife: “I
never was with any one who drained my nerve power so much.”
Years before, Dickinson had sent him four poems out of the blue. “Are you
too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?” she asked. “Should you think
it breathed... I should feel quick gratitude.” Higginson wrote back asking for
a picture, and she let him see an uncommon spirit: “I had no portrait, now, but
am small, like the wren, and my Hair is bold, like the Chestnut bur—and my
eyes, like the Sherry in the Glass, that the guest leaves—Would this do just as
well?” A wren’s quickness, burr-like hair, sherry eyes sound a rare note. But
sherry “that the guest leaves”? This is something else.
There really were fine pictures of Emily, but her sister and brother disliked
them, for lacking “the play of light and shade” in her “startling” face. Again
elusively, giving Higginson a career update, she slips into her habitual 4-3 beat:
“I made no verse, but one or two—until this winter—Sir.” In fact she ’d written
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I