“I’ve tasted Rum before.” —Emily Dickinson, in a letter to T. W. Higginson

1

Thomas Wentworth Higginson was worried. Nervously stroking his mutton-chop whiskers, he read the unsettling poem once again. Bad enough his “crack’d poetess” was about to be presented to the world, spasmodic gait and all, even after he and his co-editor, Mabel Loomis Todd, had regularized the grammar, meter, and punctuation, even the diction, in many of the verses they had selected for the inaugural volume, scheduled for the presses of Roberts Brothers in November 1890, just a few months away. But to include this poem could lead to public disgrace. It was not as disgraceful, surely, as the shapeless obscene drivel the heathen Walt Whitman had been polluting bookstalls with these past thirty years, but nonetheless an affront to the God-fearing.

No one believed that the book would sell more than a handful of copies. Publisher Thomas Niles had written to Higginson, “They [Dickinson’s poems] are as remarkable for defects as for beauties”; and, according to Mabel Todd’s daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham, in Ancestors’ Brocades, Niles insisted that Lavinia (Emily Dickinson’s younger sister) “pay for the plates” to cover the financial loss. To prevent that from happening, Higginson prepared an article for the September 25 issue of The Christian Union that would gently introduce the volume of strange new poetry to the masses, with 19 of the 115 poems slated to appear in the volume.

But as he held the page proof of what would become the 116th poem, pending his approval, Higginson read yet again the breathless lines of the woman with whom he’d been corresponding for nearly twenty-five years in his capacity as literary advisor for The Atlantic Monthly—lines that stirred his emotions in more ways than he cared to admit:

Wild Nights–Wild Nights!

Were I with thee

Wild nights should be

Our luxury!

. . .

—and the concluding stanza:

Rowing in Eden–

Ah, the Sea!

Might I but moor–Tonight–

In Thee![1]

Higginson cleared his throat, licked his dry lips and made his decision. No, this poem must not appear in the first volume. An addled reviewer might make enough of a fuss over the poem to give a distorted opinion of all the others. Should the book do well enough to warrant a second series, maybe he would recommend its inclusion there.

To everyone’s amazement the first printing of Poems, First Series, sold out rapidly, as did subsequent printings. Who could have anticipated such an enthusiastic response?

Higginson liked to think that his Sept.1890 Christian Union article, published two months before the book, had a lot to do with it—not to mention Mabel Todd’s charismatic readings of the deceased recluse’s poems across the commonwealth. He and Mabel immediately began preparing the second volume. Once again, “Wild Nights” arose like a specter to scramble his insides. In April 1891 he wrote to Todd:

Dear Friend,

One poem only I dread a little to print—that wonderful “Wild Nights,” lest the malignant read into it more than that virgin recluse ever dreamed of putting there. Has Miss Lavinia any shrinking about it? You will understand & pardon my solicitude. Yet what a loss to omit it! Indeed, it is not to be omitted.

Ever cordially,

T. W. Higginson

How presumptuous of him to think that a celibate female poet would be incapable of capturing authentic sexual longing through her verse, or that to detect sexual longing in such a deliciously ambivalent expression as “wild nights” would constitute a “malignant” reading. Just to be safe, he and Todd tucked the poem as far away from censorious eyes as they could—in the latter third of the volume, on page 97.

“Wild Nights” teases, entices. The speaker appears to be celebrating her desire for a tempestuous sexual union that would match the wild abandon of a sea storm; yet, at the same time she seeks protection from that storm. Cynthia Griffin Wolff suggests in her biography (Emily Dickinson) that Dickinson’s use of the word “luxury” is cunningly deliberate. Noah Webster, in the 1844 edition of his dictionary (the edition Dickinson owned), defined “luxury” as “voluptuousness in the gratification of appetite . . . lust.”[2] Also— and perhaps this is due to my own perspective as a male reader— doesn’t that jerky meter suggest the thrusting of two lovers engaged in unbridled sexual intercourse? Paula Bennett (Emily Dickinson: Woman Poet) regards “Wild Nights,” along with “Come slowly–Eden!” and “Did the Harebell loose her girdle / to the lover Bee” as celebrations of a woman’s “sheer physical enjoyment of female sexuality.”[3] Similarly, Helen Vendler (Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries) notes how eagerly the speaker is prepared to discard “those instruments of precision—Compass and Chart—[which] have no portion in wildness . . . relieved that she will no longer have to monitor her own navigation.”[4]

Ironically, this apparent sexual drama is staged in the mind of the speaker—not necessarily the poet, we must remember—but a “supposed person” (her phrase in an early letter to Higginson), one who only imagines being with her lover, staking out in the name of Eros a new Eden. In this drama the tempest-tossed sea/bed, and the sexual ecstasy that would be performed upon it, would constitute a return to, not expulsion from, Paradise—provided that ecstasy be moored in the beloved.

For all this audacious eroticism, there is no fulfillment. Actually, though, from Emily Dickinson’s perspective, fulfillment is perversely experienced through the lover’s absence, raising the desire for union to a fever pitch. The poem thus revels in ungratified sex (or, more precisely, revels in a sexual encounter which gratifies only if staged in the creative imagination): Were I with thee . . . Might I but moor— Tonight— / In thee. The poem’s erotic power is generated by longing alone; in other words, longing provides its own gratification—superior to “actual” physical longing because it does not end when consummated. This is not to say that conventional sexual fulfillment does not occur in Dickinson’s New Eden; but when sexual fulfillment does occur, dissolution occurs, as in the case of the fainting bee in “Come slowly, Eden,” who, “Reaching late his flower, / Round her chamber hums— / Counts his nectars— / Enters— and is lost in Balms.” “Wild Nights” is not so much about sex as it is about sex-as- death, a theme with roots in ancient religious thought—a premise George Bataille examines in his 1962 study of eroticism and the taboo, Death and Sensuality.[5] When it occurs, selfhood is breached—a state tantamount to dying (and, for Emily Dickinson, the transition from earth to heaven). In an 1869 letter Dickinson admonishes her cousin Perez Cowan for speaking of death “with so much expectation”: “I know there is no pang like that for those we love . . . but Dying is a wild Night and a new Road.”

2

I first encountered “Wild Nights” in high school, during a memorable semester with my sophomore English teacher, who likened Emily Dickinson to a sorceress, reaching beyond the grave to bewitch those who took the time to let her poems soak into their pores. It took me a while to become accustomed to her mind-stretching metaphors and hyper-compressed syntax, but the alchemy took hold. I read them to my girlfriend one weekend when I tagged along with her and her parents to Griffith Park for a picnic. Maybe I too could be the agency of erotic bewitchment, I thought wickedly, if I shared “Wild Nights” and a few other choice Emily Dickinson poems with her. So after lunch we hiked up one of the bridle trails leading to the observatory and wound up nestled inside a thicket where I pulled out my crumpled sheets of notebook paper and read the poems in a tremulous voice, watching her green eyes grow wide with that strange combination of enchantment and bemusement that students often exhibit when encountering Emily Dickinson for the first time.

3

I awoke at sunrise and sat out on the veranda of the Amber House Bed & Breakfast on Main Street, two blocks east of the Dickinson Homestead. I inhaled the crisp summer morning air, and read several Dickinson poems from the miniature volume I always carried with me. Soon, church bells from First Congregational proclaimed the faith of ages.

Erin, one of the guests at breakfast, a young mezzo-soprano from Brooklyn, was planning to tour the historic Dickinson home. She had become enchanted with Emily Dickinson’s poetry after singing several of the poems set to music by Aaron Copland on a recent recital. I explained my own visit to Amherst, mainly to study some of her so- called “worksheet” drafts (the later, pencil-draft poems, often riddled with variant words and phrases), archived in the Amherst College library, in preparation for a paper I was to present at an academic conference. The singer’s large, dark eyes widened with fascination. They reminded me of the poet’s eyes in that singular 1848 Daguerreotype. “Be careful,” I cautioned myself, “that you do not gaze too intently into those eyes; you must not transform ordinary mortals, or even extraordinary ones, into Emily Dickinson stand-ins.”

“How exciting, it must be for you,” Erin exclaimed, “to hold those actual manuscripts of hers in your hands!”

“Yes indeed,” I replied, biting into my cheese omelet, not bothering to explain that with one or two exceptions, I’d been permitted to examine only photocopies—and even the exceptions were protected by plastic sleeves. “It’s close to being a spiritual experience.”

Later that afternoon, as I strolled across the Amherst College campus, my buoyant mood suddenly became overshadowed by loneliness. But a few moments later, She appeared out of nowhere. No, wait—it was only Erin, the mezzo from the inn. She had draped a floral scarf over her head. She extended her hand, but instead of shaking it, I brought it, soft and small and warm as a wren, to my lips. She giggled, retracting it reflexively.

“For a fleeting moment, Erin, I imagined you to be Emily Dickinson in the flesh—you kind of resemble her.”

Erin giggled some more and patted her hair. “You think?”

“I feel like strolling across this lovely campus. Would you care to join me?”

She checked her watch. “Um . . . okay, sure.”

We passed the haughty, copper-green statue of Henry Ward Beecher; we passed the chapel, we passed the Amherst College Library; we paused before the World War Two memorial overlooking the Holyoke Mountains.

Erin broke the silence. “Do you suppose she ever actually fell in love?”

It was not an easy question to answer. Emily Dickinson fell in love with the world, with nature, with life itself. She fell in love with her dearest friends—especially her sister-in-law Sue. But I knew that Erin was referring to romantic, passionate love—which, for a person with such heightened emotions as Emily Dickinson, may not have been all that different from loving a dear friend. “I would say she fell in love at least twice, in the way we customarily think of falling in love. The first time was with the intended recipient of those enigmatic, anguished ‘Master’ letters—probably Samuel Bowles or the Reverend Charles Wadsworth. The second time, near the end of her life—was with Judge Otis Lord. Lord had actually died of a stroke, not long after they’d apparently confessed their love for each other.” I cleared my throat. “There were also many, um, infatuations.”

“Poor Emily,” Erin sighed.

“No, no; not ‘poor Emily’: I can’t imagine her marrying Judge Lord, or anyone else. For her, being in love demanded the lover’s absence, not his presence—or, more precisely, his presence-in-absence.” I took a deep breath and recited “Wild Nights.”

“Oh, my goodness,” Erin said, half to herself, when I finished.

The sky above the western hills was growing pink and hazy. “In other words,” Erin finally said, with a glint in her large eyes, “she had to conjure her lovers up in words, in letters, in poems—to them as well as from them, in order for them to be real to her.”

I nodded. “Writing—the soul and mind transformed into words on paper—did not merely ‘bridge’ the gulf between lover and beloved, they defined it, shaped it, thereby igniting the deepest passions love could produce—attainment in non-attainment.”

Erin smiled faintly. “Yeah, I know the feeling . . .”

“This may be a stretch, but it seemed to me that in one of her poems Higginson’s virgin recluse actually staged her narrator’s own deflowering, sardonically pushing just the right floral metaphors to their ultimate limit:

I tend my flowers for thee—

Bright Absentee!

My Fuchsia’s Coral Seams

Rip—while the Sower—dreams—

Geraniums—tint—and spot—

Low Daisies—dot—

My Cactus—splits her Beard

To show her throat— . . .

Number 339.”

“Good grief!” the singer gasped, bringing a hand to her cheek.

“There are several others. In an earlier poem, the seduction is distanced even further by casting it as a question:

Did the Harebell loose her girdle

To the lover Bee,

Would the Bee the Harebell hallow

Much as formerly?

Number 213. It’s a little like Schrödinger’s cat, right? The harebell is both ravished and not ravished; the mere allusion to the act as an uncertainty makes it reality enough.”

Erin spread her arms and exclaimed, “‘Possibility—a fairer house than prose’!”

*

Erin and I had been sitting together for nearly an hour on a bench, watching daylight fade. Now she sprang to her feet and declaimed in her gorgeous mezzo voice, “I’d rather recollect a setting / Than own a rising sun.”

I felt a sudden urge to embrace her. She sensed this, and her eyes narrowed mirthfully. I retrieved my miniature volume of Dickinson’s poems and found one (#656) that felt especially appropriate for the moment. . . .

The name—of it—is “Autumn”—

The hue—of it—is Blood—

“She uses so many anatomical metaphors,” Erin said, frowning. “Blood, brains, lungs, veins, and such—which she uses to capture moments not of agony but of ecstasy.”

I acknowledged the perceptiveness of her comment; Camille Paglia in her provocative study, Sexual Personae, comments on that very characteristic.[6] I returned to the poem:

An Artery—upon the Hill—

A Vein—along the Road—

Great Globules—in the Alleys—

And Oh, the Shower of Stain—

Erin clasped my arm. “My favorite lines are in the last stanza.” She shut her eyes, cleared her throat, and recited,

It sprinkles Bonnets—far below—

It gathers ruddy Pools—

Then—eddies like a Rose—away—

Upon Vermilion Wheels—

She opened her eyes, which now seemed . . . haunted—as if Emily Dickinson had taken possession of her soul.

“Her dashes are especially exuberant in that poem.” I showed her the printed text, difficult to see in the fading light, and Erin’s mouth fell open. “But,” I continued, “I don’t think that that’s how she wrote it down. The printed dashes are too uniform, too straight. Her dashes— the way she actually wrote them—are of different sizes; some arch upward, others downward. Elocutionary markings, for recitation! They are never gratuitous.”

All the while, I was wondering if the dashes in this poem indicated a more . . . wanton impulse. Almost in spite of myself I envisioned Emily Dickinson as a dominatrix in a tight leather bodice, Camille Paglia’s Madame de Sade, wielding dash-barbed phrases like a cat-o-nine tails against her lover’s backside, watching the flesh become rapidly . . . autumnal. Just as “A wounded deer—leaps highest—”; just as “I like a look of Agony / Because I know it’s true”—sexual pleasure could not be dissociated from pain, loss, or absence.

Erin stared at me, her moon eyes nearly bulging, as if suddenly able to read my thoughts.

Alas, my fetishistic fantasy had disrupted the sweet serenity of our communion, for she suddenly glanced at her watch, made some excuse about being late for a dinner engagement, and dashed off.

5

Emily Dickinson’s erotic sensibility is subtle and pregnant with paradox. I sometimes wonder if her entire body of work is essentially a sexualized theology, an anguished effort to re-ignite our spiritual lives after they have been so thoroughly de-paganized by Christian orthodoxy; and what better way to re-sexualize ourselves than with language?

Her first order of business: eroticize God and Heaven:

I went to Heaven—

‘Twas a small Town—

Lit—with a Ruby—

Lathed—with Down—

(#374)

Heaven as clitoris? Paula Bennett thinks so.[7] Heaven as the female body awakened by sexual stimulation—and self-stimulation, no less? How blasphemous can one get! Salvation is not only to be achieved erotically, through the flesh; it is to be achieved auto-erotically. That which the Calvinist would condemn as an obstacle to Heaven here becomes Heaven itself.

Many of Emily Dickinson’s readers tend to see these erotic poems as obliquely autobiographical, a kind of shorthand allusion to her private sexual longings instead of dramatically rendered moments of universal being. My response is that her “actual” experience, whatever it was, or wasn’t, is immaterial. Like Dante, Shakespeare, and Keats, she knew how to wrap the universal in the flesh of the fictive particular.

For Dickinson, soul and heaven, if they are to hold meaning, must be made flesh. The mind that contemplates bliss does so by encapsulating it with mortal flesh. Indeed, the mind itself must project itself, not so much as Thought but as Brain—which is not only “wider than the Sky” (#632) but a lot sexier, albeit a lot more mortal.

Why is it that in her most erotic poems we seem to find ourselves nearest the burial ground? Take one more step toward Fulfillment, toward consummation, orgasm, and one will become one of her “finished” creatures: Consummatum est. Departure is more sensuous than arrival; denial and deprivation pack more deliciously ambivalent erotic-spiritual force than possession and gratification:

To be forgot by thee

Surpasses Memory

Of other minds

The Heart cannot forget

Unless it contemplate

What it declines . . .

(#1560)

To contemplate what is declined, to long to be moored in the arms of one’s lover raises sexual love to a higher reality—but we are not in Plato’s universe of essences and pure ideas—oh no: the physical truly matters to Dickinson, but it is the physical that must remain out of reach, palpably so. In fact, even Heaven is physical, another name for God, who is not to be distinguished from guardian or lover—but once again is tantalizingly just beyond her reach. Heaven, like the desired lover, is most meaningful and real when its—his—absence is a Presence. In another poem (#1055), Heaven appears as a lover waiting with high expectations for his beloved Soul:

The Soul should always stand ajar

That if the Heaven inquire

He will not be obliged to wait

Or shy of troubling Her

Depart, before the Host have slid

The bolt unto the Door—

To search for the accomplished Guest,

Her visitor, no more—

For Dickinson, as for me, departure is more heartrending than arrival. Denial and deprivation pack a more deliciously ambivalent erotic/spiritual force than possession and consummation. The longer and more intense the absence, the greater the erotic force that builds like a volcano’s until her “Thigh of Granite” erupts; until the “Solemn— Torrid—Symbol” of her volcanic sexuality—“The lips that never lie— / Whose hissing Corals part—and shut—” rain molten lava of recognition upon an astonished public; until there is poetry “—And Cities ooze away—”

6

Night had descended upon Amherst as I made my way back toward the Amber House B & B. When I passed by the Poet’s homestead— that stately Federalist brick mansion that Emily Dickinson’s grandfather built in 1813—I gazed up at the second-floor west window . . . Her bedroom window . . . , and I willed her to appear, just once, to bid me good night.

I waited, patiently, in the darkness.

At long last the curtains, like arms swathed in gossamer—stirred— and spread apart.

Fred D. White’s essays have appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, College Literature, Pleiades, and Southwest Review, among others. He is the author of Approaching Emily Dickinson: Critical Currents and Crosscurrents since 1960 (Camden House, 2008), and several books for writers—most recently, Where Do You Get Your Ideas? A Writer’s Guide to Transforming Notions into Narratives (Writer’s Digest Books, 2012), and The Writer’s Idea Thesaurus (Writer’s Digest Books, 2014). A Professor Emeritus of English (Santa Clara University), he lives near Sacramento, CA.

NOTES

1. Poem 249 in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (New York: Little, Brown, 1960).

2. This definition is cited by Wolff, 384.

3. Bennett, 167.

4. Vendler, 94.

5. New York: Ballantine Books, 1962; see esp. Chapter 8, “From Religious Sacrifice to Eroticism.”

6. See esp. Sexual Personae, 624-628. Paglia writes, “The brutality of this Belle of Amherst would stop a truck. She is a virtuoso of sadomasochistic surrealism” (624).

7. Bennett writes, “A network of specifically female genital images, including both the vagina and the clitoris . . . pervades her work” (154).

“I’ve tasted Rum before.” —Emily Dickinson, in a letter to T. W. Higginson

1

Thomas Wentworth Higginson was worried. Nervously stroking his mutton-chop whiskers, he read the unsettling poem once again. Bad enough his “crack’d poetess” was about to be presented to the world, spasmodic gait and all, even after he and his co-editor, Mabel Loomis Todd, had regularized the grammar, meter, and punctuation, even the diction, in many of the verses they had selected for the inaugural volume, scheduled for the presses of Roberts Brothers in November 1890, just a few months away. But to include this poem could lead to public disgrace. It was not as disgraceful, surely, as the shapeless obscene drivel the heathen Walt Whitman had been polluting bookstalls with these past thirty years, but nonetheless an affront to the God-fearing.

No one believed that the book would sell more than a handful of copies. Publisher Thomas Niles had written to Higginson, “They [Dickinson’s poems] are as remarkable for defects as for beauties”; and, according to Mabel Todd’s daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham, in Ancestors’ Brocades, Niles insisted that Lavinia (Emily Dickinson’s younger sister) “pay for the plates” to cover the financial loss. To prevent that from happening, Higginson prepared an article for the September 25 issue of The Christian Union that would gently introduce the volume of strange new poetry to the masses, with 19 of the 115 poems slated to appear in the volume.

But as he held the page proof of what would become the 116th poem, pending his approval, Higginson read yet again the breathless lines of the woman with whom he’d been corresponding for nearly twenty-five years in his capacity as literary advisor for The Atlantic Monthly—lines that stirred his emotions in more ways than he cared to admit:

Wild Nights–Wild Nights!

Were I with thee

Wild nights should be

Our luxury!

. . .

—and the concluding stanza:

Rowing in Eden–

Ah, the Sea!

Might I but moor–Tonight–

In Thee![1]

Higginson cleared his throat, licked his dry lips and made his decision. No, this poem must not appear in the first volume. An addled reviewer might make enough of a fuss over the poem to give a distorted opinion of all the others. Should the book do well enough to warrant a second series, maybe he would recommend its inclusion there.

To everyone’s amazement the first printing of Poems, First Series, sold out rapidly, as did subsequent printings. Who could have anticipated such an enthusiastic response?

Higginson liked to think that his Sept.1890 Christian Union article, published two months before the book, had a lot to do with it—not to mention Mabel Todd’s charismatic readings of the deceased recluse’s poems across the commonwealth. He and Mabel immediately began preparing the second volume. Once again, “Wild Nights” arose like a specter to scramble his insides. In April 1891 he wrote to Todd:

Dear Friend,

One poem only I dread a little to print—that wonderful “Wild Nights,” lest the malignant read into it more than that virgin recluse ever dreamed of putting there. Has Miss Lavinia any shrinking about it? You will understand & pardon my solicitude. Yet what a loss to omit it! Indeed, it is not to be omitted.

Ever cordially,

T. W. Higginson

How presumptuous of him to think that a celibate female poet would be incapable of capturing authentic sexual longing through her verse, or that to detect sexual longing in such a deliciously ambivalent expression as “wild nights” would constitute a “malignant” reading. Just to be safe, he and Todd tucked the poem as far away from censorious eyes as they could—in the latter third of the volume, on page 97.

“Wild Nights” teases, entices. The speaker appears to be celebrating her desire for a tempestuous sexual union that would match the wild abandon of a sea storm; yet, at the same time she seeks protection from that storm. Cynthia Griffin Wolff suggests in her biography (Emily Dickinson) that Dickinson’s use of the word “luxury” is cunningly deliberate. Noah Webster, in the 1844 edition of his dictionary (the edition Dickinson owned), defined “luxury” as “voluptuousness in the gratification of appetite . . . lust.”[2] Also— and perhaps this is due to my own perspective as a male reader— doesn’t that jerky meter suggest the thrusting of two lovers engaged in unbridled sexual intercourse? Paula Bennett (Emily Dickinson: Woman Poet) regards “Wild Nights,” along with “Come slowly–Eden!” and “Did the Harebell loose her girdle / to the lover Bee” as celebrations of a woman’s “sheer physical enjoyment of female sexuality.”[3] Similarly, Helen Vendler (Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries) notes how eagerly the speaker is prepared to discard “those instruments of precision—Compass and Chart—[which] have no portion in wildness . . . relieved that she will no longer have to monitor her own navigation.”[4]

Ironically, this apparent sexual drama is staged in the mind of the speaker—not necessarily the poet, we must remember—but a “supposed person” (her phrase in an early letter to Higginson), one who only imagines being with her lover, staking out in the name of Eros a new Eden. In this drama the tempest-tossed sea/bed, and the sexual ecstasy that would be performed upon it, would constitute a return to, not expulsion from, Paradise—provided that ecstasy be moored in the beloved.

For all this audacious eroticism, there is no fulfillment. Actually, though, from Emily Dickinson’s perspective, fulfillment is perversely experienced through the lover’s absence, raising the desire for union to a fever pitch. The poem thus revels in ungratified sex (or, more precisely, revels in a sexual encounter which gratifies only if staged in the creative imagination): Were I with thee . . . Might I but moor— Tonight— / In thee. The poem’s erotic power is generated by longing alone; in other words, longing provides its own gratification—superior to “actual” physical longing because it does not end when consummated. This is not to say that conventional sexual fulfillment does not occur in Dickinson’s New Eden; but when sexual fulfillment does occur, dissolution occurs, as in the case of the fainting bee in “Come slowly, Eden,” who, “Reaching late his flower, / Round her chamber hums— / Counts his nectars— / Enters— and is lost in Balms.” “Wild Nights” is not so much about sex as it is about sex-as- death, a theme with roots in ancient religious thought—a premise George Bataille examines in his 1962 study of eroticism and the taboo, Death and Sensuality.[5] When it occurs, selfhood is breached—a state tantamount to dying (and, for Emily Dickinson, the transition from earth to heaven). In an 1869 letter Dickinson admonishes her cousin Perez Cowan for speaking of death “with so much expectation”: “I know there is no pang like that for those we love . . . but Dying is a wild Night and a new Road.”

2

I first encountered “Wild Nights” in high school, during a memorable semester with my sophomore English teacher, who likened Emily Dickinson to a sorceress, reaching beyond the grave to bewitch those who took the time to let her poems soak into their pores. It took me a while to become accustomed to her mind-stretching metaphors and hyper-compressed syntax, but the alchemy took hold. I read them to my girlfriend one weekend when I tagged along with her and her parents to Griffith Park for a picnic. Maybe I too could be the agency of erotic bewitchment, I thought wickedly, if I shared “Wild Nights” and a few other choice Emily Dickinson poems with her. So after lunch we hiked up one of the bridle trails leading to the observatory and wound up nestled inside a thicket where I pulled out my crumpled sheets of notebook paper and read the poems in a tremulous voice, watching her green eyes grow wide with that strange combination of enchantment and bemusement that students often exhibit when encountering Emily Dickinson for the first time.

3

I awoke at sunrise and sat out on the veranda of the Amber House Bed & Breakfast on Main Street, two blocks east of the Dickinson Homestead. I inhaled the crisp summer morning air, and read several Dickinson poems from the miniature volume I always carried with me. Soon, church bells from First Congregational proclaimed the faith of ages.

Erin, one of the guests at breakfast, a young mezzo-soprano from Brooklyn, was planning to tour the historic Dickinson home. She had become enchanted with Emily Dickinson’s poetry after singing several of the poems set to music by Aaron Copland on a recent recital. I explained my own visit to Amherst, mainly to study some of her so- called “worksheet” drafts (the later, pencil-draft poems, often riddled with variant words and phrases), archived in the Amherst College library, in preparation for a paper I was to present at an academic conference. The singer’s large, dark eyes widened with fascination. They reminded me of the poet’s eyes in that singular 1848 Daguerreotype. “Be careful,” I cautioned myself, “that you do not gaze too intently into those eyes; you must not transform ordinary mortals, or even extraordinary ones, into Emily Dickinson stand-ins.”

“How exciting, it must be for you,” Erin exclaimed, “to hold those actual manuscripts of hers in your hands!”

“Yes indeed,” I replied, biting into my cheese omelet, not bothering to explain that with one or two exceptions, I’d been permitted to examine only photocopies—and even the exceptions were protected by plastic sleeves. “It’s close to being a spiritual experience.”

Later that afternoon, as I strolled across the Amherst College campus, my buoyant mood suddenly became overshadowed by loneliness. But a few moments later, She appeared out of nowhere. No, wait—it was only Erin, the mezzo from the inn. She had draped a floral scarf over her head. She extended her hand, but instead of shaking it, I brought it, soft and small and warm as a wren, to my lips. She giggled, retracting it reflexively.

“For a fleeting moment, Erin, I imagined you to be Emily Dickinson in the flesh—you kind of resemble her.”

Erin giggled some more and patted her hair. “You think?”

“I feel like strolling across this lovely campus. Would you care to join me?”

She checked her watch. “Um . . . okay, sure.”

We passed the haughty, copper-green statue of Henry Ward Beecher; we passed the chapel, we passed the Amherst College Library; we paused before the World War Two memorial overlooking the Holyoke Mountains.

Erin broke the silence. “Do you suppose she ever actually fell in love?”

It was not an easy question to answer. Emily Dickinson fell in love with the world, with nature, with life itself. She fell in love with her dearest friends—especially her sister-in-law Sue. But I knew that Erin was referring to romantic, passionate love—which, for a person with such heightened emotions as Emily Dickinson, may not have been all that different from loving a dear friend. “I would say she fell in love at least twice, in the way we customarily think of falling in love. The first time was with the intended recipient of those enigmatic, anguished ‘Master’ letters—probably Samuel Bowles or the Reverend Charles Wadsworth. The second time, near the end of her life—was with Judge Otis Lord. Lord had actually died of a stroke, not long after they’d apparently confessed their love for each other.” I cleared my throat. “There were also many, um, infatuations.”

“Poor Emily,” Erin sighed.

“No, no; not ‘poor Emily’: I can’t imagine her marrying Judge Lord, or anyone else. For her, being in love demanded the lover’s absence, not his presence—or, more precisely, his presence-in-absence.” I took a deep breath and recited “Wild Nights.”

“Oh, my goodness,” Erin said, half to herself, when I finished.

The sky above the western hills was growing pink and hazy. “In other words,” Erin finally said, with a glint in her large eyes, “she had to conjure her lovers up in words, in letters, in poems—to them as well as from them, in order for them to be real to her.”

I nodded. “Writing—the soul and mind transformed into words on paper—did not merely ‘bridge’ the gulf between lover and beloved, they defined it, shaped it, thereby igniting the deepest passions love could produce—attainment in non-attainment.”

Erin smiled faintly. “Yeah, I know the feeling . . .”

“This may be a stretch, but it seemed to me that in one of her poems Higginson’s virgin recluse actually staged her narrator’s own deflowering, sardonically pushing just the right floral metaphors to their ultimate limit:

I tend my flowers for thee—

Bright Absentee!

My Fuchsia’s Coral Seams

Rip—while the Sower—dreams—

Geraniums—tint—and spot—

Low Daisies—dot—

My Cactus—splits her Beard

To show her throat— . . .

Number 339.”

“Good grief!” the singer gasped, bringing a hand to her cheek.

“There are several others. In an earlier poem, the seduction is distanced even further by casting it as a question:

Did the Harebell loose her girdle

To the lover Bee,

Would the Bee the Harebell hallow

Much as formerly?

Number 213. It’s a little like Schrödinger’s cat, right? The harebell is both ravished and not ravished; the mere allusion to the act as an uncertainty makes it reality enough.”

Erin spread her arms and exclaimed, “‘Possibility—a fairer house than prose’!”

*

Erin and I had been sitting together for nearly an hour on a bench, watching daylight fade. Now she sprang to her feet and declaimed in her gorgeous mezzo voice, “I’d rather recollect a setting / Than own a rising sun.”

I felt a sudden urge to embrace her. She sensed this, and her eyes narrowed mirthfully. I retrieved my miniature volume of Dickinson’s poems and found one (#656) that felt especially appropriate for the moment. . . .

The name—of it—is “Autumn”—

The hue—of it—is Blood—

“She uses so many anatomical metaphors,” Erin said, frowning. “Blood, brains, lungs, veins, and such—which she uses to capture moments not of agony but of ecstasy.”

I acknowledged the perceptiveness of her comment; Camille Paglia in her provocative study, Sexual Personae, comments on that very characteristic.[6] I returned to the poem:

An Artery—upon the Hill—

A Vein—along the Road—

Great Globules—in the Alleys—

And Oh, the Shower of Stain—

Erin clasped my arm. “My favorite lines are in the last stanza.” She shut her eyes, cleared her throat, and recited,

It sprinkles Bonnets—far below—

It gathers ruddy Pools—

Then—eddies like a Rose—away—

Upon Vermilion Wheels—

She opened her eyes, which now seemed . . . haunted—as if Emily Dickinson had taken possession of her soul.

“Her dashes are especially exuberant in that poem.” I showed her the printed text, difficult to see in the fading light, and Erin’s mouth fell open. “But,” I continued, “I don’t think that that’s how she wrote it down. The printed dashes are too uniform, too straight. Her dashes— the way she actually wrote them—are of different sizes; some arch upward, others downward. Elocutionary markings, for recitation! They are never gratuitous.”

All the while, I was wondering if the dashes in this poem indicated a more . . . wanton impulse. Almost in spite of myself I envisioned Emily Dickinson as a dominatrix in a tight leather bodice, Camille Paglia’s Madame de Sade, wielding dash-barbed phrases like a cat-o-nine tails against her lover’s backside, watching the flesh become rapidly . . . autumnal. Just as “A wounded deer—leaps highest—”; just as “I like a look of Agony / Because I know it’s true”—sexual pleasure could not be dissociated from pain, loss, or absence.

Erin stared at me, her moon eyes nearly bulging, as if suddenly able to read my thoughts.

Alas, my fetishistic fantasy had disrupted the sweet serenity of our communion, for she suddenly glanced at her watch, made some excuse about being late for a dinner engagement, and dashed off.

5

Emily Dickinson’s erotic sensibility is subtle and pregnant with paradox. I sometimes wonder if her entire body of work is essentially a sexualized theology, an anguished effort to re-ignite our spiritual lives after they have been so thoroughly de-paganized by Christian orthodoxy; and what better way to re-sexualize ourselves than with language?

Her first order of business: eroticize God and Heaven:

I went to Heaven—

‘Twas a small Town—

Lit—with a Ruby—

Lathed—with Down—

(#374)

Heaven as clitoris? Paula Bennett thinks so.[7] Heaven as the female body awakened by sexual stimulation—and self-stimulation, no less? How blasphemous can one get! Salvation is not only to be achieved erotically, through the flesh; it is to be achieved auto-erotically. That which the Calvinist would condemn as an obstacle to Heaven here becomes Heaven itself.

Many of Emily Dickinson’s readers tend to see these erotic poems as obliquely autobiographical, a kind of shorthand allusion to her private sexual longings instead of dramatically rendered moments of universal being. My response is that her “actual” experience, whatever it was, or wasn’t, is immaterial. Like Dante, Shakespeare, and Keats, she knew how to wrap the universal in the flesh of the fictive particular.

For Dickinson, soul and heaven, if they are to hold meaning, must be made flesh. The mind that contemplates bliss does so by encapsulating it with mortal flesh. Indeed, the mind itself must project itself, not so much as Thought but as Brain—which is not only “wider than the Sky” (#632) but a lot sexier, albeit a lot more mortal.

Why is it that in her most erotic poems we seem to find ourselves nearest the burial ground? Take one more step toward Fulfillment, toward consummation, orgasm, and one will become one of her “finished” creatures: Consummatum est. Departure is more sensuous than arrival; denial and deprivation pack more deliciously ambivalent erotic-spiritual force than possession and gratification:

To be forgot by thee

Surpasses Memory

Of other minds

The Heart cannot forget

Unless it contemplate

What it declines . . .

(#1560)

To contemplate what is declined, to long to be moored in the arms of one’s lover raises sexual love to a higher reality—but we are not in Plato’s universe of essences and pure ideas—oh no: the physical truly matters to Dickinson, but it is the physical that must remain out of reach, palpably so. In fact, even Heaven is physical, another name for God, who is not to be distinguished from guardian or lover—but once again is tantalizingly just beyond her reach. Heaven, like the desired lover, is most meaningful and real when its—his—absence is a Presence. In another poem (#1055), Heaven appears as a lover waiting with high expectations for his beloved Soul:

The Soul should always stand ajar

That if the Heaven inquire

He will not be obliged to wait

Or shy of troubling Her

Depart, before the Host have slid

The bolt unto the Door—

To search for the accomplished Guest,

Her visitor, no more—

For Dickinson, as for me, departure is more heartrending than arrival. Denial and deprivation pack a more deliciously ambivalent erotic/spiritual force than possession and consummation. The longer and more intense the absence, the greater the erotic force that builds like a volcano’s until her “Thigh of Granite” erupts; until the “Solemn— Torrid—Symbol” of her volcanic sexuality—“The lips that never lie— / Whose hissing Corals part—and shut—” rain molten lava of recognition upon an astonished public; until there is poetry “—And Cities ooze away—”

6

Night had descended upon Amherst as I made my way back toward the Amber House B & B. When I passed by the Poet’s homestead— that stately Federalist brick mansion that Emily Dickinson’s grandfather built in 1813—I gazed up at the second-floor west window . . . Her bedroom window . . . , and I willed her to appear, just once, to bid me good night.

I waited, patiently, in the darkness.

At long last the curtains, like arms swathed in gossamer—stirred— and spread apart.