Giles Watson's Blog

We Grow Accustomed to the Dark

He stands at the door and knocks. Last year’s umbels, now brittle plant-skeletons, lean beside it, and stems of almost-leafless ivy have climbed the wood, rootlets clutching at the grain. Above the door, the leaves hang more luxuriant. Stains of rust run down from the nails. The hinges have long iron flanges which hold the boards together. A few green bramble leaves are still among the bases of the umbels, but it is clearly winter. Behind him, stars are pin-points among the naked branches of trees. The sky is a nocturnal hue – greenish-blue with a glowing hint of gold, which crystallises like frost to form his halo. The orb of the halo itself is pierced by his crown of thorns, and the leaves from the twisted briars that pierce his scalp seem to have impressed themselves in the gold leaf of the halo. He is coped in a wine-red, jewelled robe. Underneath this, he wears a simple white surplice, which is mottled with the shadows of the night, and brightly lit at one side by an ornate Romanesque lantern – itself embossed with stars – which also shines upon the door. His face, lit from below, is framed by a long, woolly-red beard, hair and moustache. His irises are large and dark, each touched by a pinprick of light – the same size in the picture as the stars – which reflects the light of the lantern.

The painting itself is a Romanesque arch. It is called ‘The Light of the World’, painted by the Pre-Raphaelite William Holman Hunt between 1851 and 1854: a representation of the words of Christ in Revelation 3:20: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.” As soon as it was installed in Keble College Chapel in Oxford, it drew such substantial crowds that the College started charging admittance for people to see it, and Hunt found it necessary to paint another, smaller copy. Engravings of it rapidly proliferated, and crossed the Atlantic. The painting was destined to tour the world in the early twentieth century, and there were claims that it had been viewed by four fifths of the population of Australia. When it was painted, the vogue for “nocturnes” had already been established in music by Chopin, but would not be prolifically expressed in painting until Whistler took up the theme in the 1870s.

Eight years after the painting was completed, a religious revival was sweeping Massachusetts, but it left Emily Dickinson fundamentally unstirred. In late August, 1861, she wrote in a letter to Mary Bowles – wife of Samuel, who had published three of her poems in the Springfield Republican, and would publish ‘Safe in their Alabaster Chambers’ the following year – “The Doubt like the Mosquito, buzzes round my faith.” In a letter to her much beloved Susan Gilbert, her brother’s wife, she wrote a poem in the same year which seemed also to be a reference to Revelation 3:20:

Just so – Jesus – raps –
He – doesn’t weary –
Last – at the Knocker
And first – at the Bell.
Then – on divinest tiptoe – standing –
Might He but spy the lady’s soul –
When He – retires –
Chilled – or weary –
It will be ample time for – me –
Patient – opon the steps – until then –
Heart! I am knocking – low at thee.

Unlike Emily, the rest of her family did not drag their heels over making professions of faith. 1862 marked the beginning of her correspondence with the abolitionist and literary enthusiast, Thomas Wentworth Higginson. She sent him a small selection of her poems, asking him if they seemed to be “alive”. He must have responded in the affirmative and asked her to tell him about herself, because on April 28, 1862, she answered him in detail:

“I had a terror – since September – I could tell to none – and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground, because I am afraid… I have a Brother and a Sister – My Mother does not care for thought – and Father, too busy with his Briefs – to notice what we do – He buys me many Books, but begs me not to read them – because he fears they joggle the mind. They are religious, except me, and address an Eclipse, every morning – whom they call their “Father.”

In Massachusetts, here had been a solar eclipse in May 1854, when Emily was twenty-three. It had been an annular eclipse – one in which the Moon was far enough away from the Earth that there was a halo of bright sunlight around the shadow of totality – but in her poetry, Emily remembered the darkness more than that searing ring of light. In any event, she chose the well-read, “joggled” mind over both religious certainty and unquestioning faith in the science of her time, and whilst we do not know for certain what the “terror” that gripped her in September 1861 really entailed, its orb of darkness is always with us as we navigate her verse. Later in 1862, the confusion of a total eclipse was insinuating its way into a poem:

Sunset at Night – is natural –
But Sunset on the Dawn
Reverses Nature – Master –
So Midnight’s – due – at Noon –

Eclipses be – predicted –
And Science bows them in –
But do One face us suddenly –
Jehovah’s Watch – is wrong –

Science may be able to predict an eclipse of the Sun – or Sol – but an eclipse of the soul is another matter. It creeps upon us unexpectedly, whether it involves a loss of faith in a human Master or in providence, whether it is provoked by a medical or psychological episode, a sudden death, or even a not-so-sudden one.

*

I travelled across England once, driven by a close friend, with the intention of going far enough south-west to be able to witness a total eclipse of the sun. My friend had decided that our destination should be Buckfast Abbey, not far from Torquay, on the edge of the Dartmoor National Park. My chief memory of the journey is that it was extremely tortuous, marred by wrong turnings and motorway tailbacks, but somehow, we reached our destination just in time. There was no time to look around the abbey. We stepped out of the car, stretching our legs, and a shadow instantly began to creep across the land. A flock of jackdaws and rooks appeared out of nowhere and headed straight off to roost in a rookery high in the trees. The sun itself was behind a cloud, so we saw no lunar disc slipping in front of the corona, but, bowed in by Science, Midnight came upon us during the day.

I am remembering this now because a few days ago, my friend’s son told me that her long battle with cancer had ended. Science had predicted the likelihood of that, too, but in a world where rapists and dictators live into their eighties, it certainly feels to me as though “Jehovah’s Watch – is wrong.”

*

If the work of Dickinsonian scholars is to be believed, Emily’s very next poem was one of her greatest masterpieces: a work that invokes the opening of the Gospel of John – and perhaps even Holman Hunt’s painting – but, without denying the terror of it, imbues darkness itself with positive qualities:

We grow accustomed to the Dark -
When Light is put away -

- which, in the literal sense, is scientifically true: if we step from a light place into a darker one, then over the course of about twenty minutes, our irises contract, our pupils broaden, and moonlight or starlight shows us the way. The opening pronoun is significant. We all, whether sighted or not, meet situations in which we must accommodate to new realities, whether they are serious ones like bereavement, or more trivial reminders of our own ageing process, such as having to get used to a denture or a stronger pair of spectacles. But Dickinson stays with the metaphor:

As when the Neighbour holds the Lamp
To witness her Good bye -

A Moment - we uncertain step
From newness of the night -
Then - fit our Vision to the Dark -
And meet the Road - erect -

Let us continue to read the poem literally for a while, since its author is steadfastly encouraging us to do so. Emily Dickinson has been visiting a neighbour in Amherst, Massachusetts, and whilst they have been indoors, it has grown dark outside. The path through the garden to the road is an uneven one, so the neighbour lights a lamp, and holding it aloft, lights Emily’s way to the garden gate, wishes her goodbye, and turns to go back inside. The neighbour shuts the front door, leaving Emily in darkness at the edge of the road. For a moment, she stumbles. Then, she stands still and waits. Slowly, in starlight – or moonlight if there is any – the form of the picket fence and the trees against the sky become clear to her, though drained of all colour. At last the curve of the road reveals itself. The occasional puddle gleams from a cart-rut or a pothole. What was “darkness” minutes before now reveals itself as a new form of light: the pale light of night. Emily realises that the darkness has caused her to lean forward, for fear of falling, but now her posture straightens, and she meets the road erect.

As an inveterate night-walker who has sought the calls of owls, nightjars and frogs without a torch or lantern even on nights without a moon, I recognise the quiet thrill of this moment. I am not alone in this. The English musician and collector of folk-songs, Sam Lee, is in the habit of taking small groups of people into the woods at night without a light source, in order to listen for nightingales – and, in the company of other musicians, to sing in concert with the birds. Recently, too, on a camp with a large group of children, aged eleven to twelve, I went on a torchless night-walk through ancient jarrah forest near to Dwellingup, far enough south of Perth, Western Australia, that there was no unnatural illumination of the sky. There was a palpable anxiety in the group as we started out, but the camp leaders had given us a simple system for ensuring that no one was lost: we were divided into groups of ten, and within those, each person had a number. There were regular pauses where, gradually standing more erect, we counted ourselves present. We walked deep into the forest, and the tall trees were barely-tangible presences on every side of us. For a while, each group was left alone in the darkness. The voices in my group grew louder and higher, quavering between exhilaration and panic. I sang a Taylor Swift song to calm them down, and after their expressions of surprise that I knew the words, we were able to lapse for a while into silence. It was a deep part of the forest. We could only see stars, and the dark rivers between them which were the trunks and branches of gigantic trees, eclipsing the sky. A mighty awe descended. Slowly, we were ushered back to camp, and some of us were sad to leave the darkness. Another song was in my mind. “Hello Darkness, my old friend…”

There is something in us that yearns for darkness – to be enwombed in it once more – despite its dangers, and despite the fact that its worst perils are posed by other human beings. Here in Western Australia, there is a movement called ‘Reclaim the Night’ which asserts women’s right to walk alone at night, free from the threat of sexual assault. The theft of women’s right to darkness is one of the most ubiquitous and iniquitous effects of patriarchy. It is the real wraith which, for modern readers in a pandemic of male violence, haunts that story of Emily Dickinson walking home at night-time from a visit to her neighbour.

Before proceeding, we should take note that “Neighbour” was capitalised, and so was “Lamp”. This Neighbour is someone like the Jesus who stands at the door in Holman Hunt’s painting, but the situation is reversed: the Lamp-holder is not seeking admission, but re-entering the home and closing the door. The withdrawal of the Neighbour and the Lamp brings on the “newness of the night” – and for a moment, Dickinson lets us see that we are in the midst of an extended metaphor:

And so of larger - Darknesses -
Those Evenings of the Brain -
When not a Moon disclose a sign -
Or Star - come out - within -

Those who seek to psychologise Dickinson will find depression in those “larger – Darknesses”. One biographer – not entirely convincingly – has concluded that she was epileptic. But Dickinson would also have been aware of mystical traditions in which Darkness is, as an anonymous fourteenth century English author put it, a “cloud of unknowing” which must be entered if the spirit is to advance towards the divine. Saint John of the Cross called it the “Dark Night of the Soul”. The questing spirit must divest itself of earthly attachments and place them under “a cloud of forgetting”. A highly intelligent, exceptionally well-read woman like Dickinson must also sometimes embrace those “Evenings of the Brain” in order to be able to see with spiritual clarity.

And this is the moment where I assert that Dickinson’s poem becomes the masterpiece I promised. She drags us back to the reality of the person on the homeward road in the darkness:

The Bravest - grope a little -
And sometimes hit a Tree
Directly in the Forehead -

Smack. The poem turns slapstick. Our protagonist is dazed and reeling. Night-walkers like me know this moment all too well – but then, risking painful encounters with unseen tree-trunks, I have heard the Nightjar, and Sam Lee has sung with Nightingales. Once, in an English oak wood, a Roe Deer came right up to me amid the bracken, before crashing off through the woods. As night-walkers grow more experienced, we realise that our best night-vision is impaired for those twenty minutes while our irises are accommodating to the darkness. Be patient, and the nocturnal world begins to dawn on you. That is why a seasoned night walker doesn’t take a torch, even for the darkest parts, and doesn’t consult a phone or glowing watch half-way through the woods. To do so is to set the night-vision back to the first minute in the darkness. If darkness is going to be your friend, you have to let it sit with you.

But as they learn to see -

Either the Darkness alters -
Or something in the sight
Adjusts itself to Midnight -
And Life steps almost straight.

Not straight, but “almost straight”. Night walking is an exercise in tentativeness, and there are Midnights when Life is like that, too. But when we walk at night, and really do see, feel and hear our way, it is also something that we have proven to ourselves. If our eyes are capable of adjustment, so is the rest of us. Sometimes, we adjust ourselves without knowing it.

*

I know that I have excellent night and distance vision, but for most of my life, I have had undiagnosed Binocular Vision Dysfunction. My eyes are not quite aligned, so for decades they have been sending double images to my brain, and my brain has been sorting them out so that I am not even aware that I have been seeing double images. This has been an exhausting thing for my brain to have to do. Without my new spectacles, I have been stepping “almost straight” in broad daylight for most of my life, because undulations in a pavement, or in the grass, or in the sand on a beach, are more or less invisible to me. I have habitually walked with a slightly stumbling gait. My natural tendency is to lean my head to the left, because that helps my brain to sort out the images. When I first began to wear the spectacles that correct this dysfunction, I walked around in a delighted daze. I would sit in meetings and school assemblies, enthralled by the three-dimensionality of the rows of people around me. I would walk through our orchard, utterly flabbergasted at the way leaves would reach out to me on the ends of their branches. As a result, I am literally stepping straighter in broad daylight.

But I am wondering whether living unknowingly with Binocular Vision Dysfunction gave me an advantage when it came to walking at night. I was already unconsciously reliant on my other senses to help me to orientate myself when walking, so learning to see when walking in darkness came more easily.

Like Emily Dickinson, I have always thought that the Neighbour is re-entering the house with the lantern, not standing at my own door, holding the light and knocking. Throughout life, I have regularly “hit a Tree / Directly in the forehead”, not quite adjusted to the Midnight of my doubt, or over-confident about my way forward. Like Dickinson too, I suspect, I have sometimes been held up a moment by the capitalised “Tree”, the old word for the Cross, via the Latin crux, which can denote either the plant or the Roman instrument of execution. Stepping into the darkness, there is the risk that I might walk – thwack – into Christ crucified.

But no – wait – stand longer. Find the path. Feel it beneath the feet. Look for the star-gleam on the edge of a pebble.

The Darkness will embrace me, and amid it, there are growing glints of light. Water glistens on the leading edge of a leaf. A damp place glows dimly with bioluminescence. There might have been wraiths in this darkness, but I am stepping beyond the fear. The Nightingale is not afraid of me either, because I have become a creature of her element. I belong in this world beyond eclipse. She is singing, and so am I.

Essay by Giles Watson. In Memoriam: Yvonne Parrey, 2024. The fourteenth century 'Cloud of Unknowing' was one of her favourite texts.

Dressed in Mechlin

The only Ghost I ever saw

… wrote Emily Dickinson some time in 1862, at the beginning of a deluge of poetic inspiration. Edgar Allan Poe was already dead, and ghosts were in vogue, as they would be throughout the nineteenth century, both in Britain and in America. Dickinson herself was alluding to them repeatedly that year. In one poem, “The Shapes we buried” wait for us in the eternal world, a “Mouldering Playmate”, “Bright Knots of Apparitions” that will “Salute us, with their wings” when we arrive in their otherworld, as if we the Living, not they the Dead, are the ghostly ones. In another, she sees Death itself as a ghastly form of liberation, and finds looking on the dead “so appalling - it exhilirates [her spelling]”: “To scan a Ghost, is faint / But grappling, conquers it - ”. In a third, it is Dickinson herself who has died, a year ago, carried out like too-young corn with its tassels still hanging. In yet another, she faces something which seems like Death, but cannot be, because she, ghostlike, is standing up, and concludes that she is in Despair. But this ghost…

Was dressed in Mechlin - so -
He had no sandal on his foot -
And stepped like flakes of snow -

Mechlin is one of the oldest forms of lace, manufactured in the Flemish Municipality of Mechelen. It is exquisitely intricate, made without the use of pins. This ghost must have been tremendously wealthy in life, if he was dressed entirely in Mechlin, an enormously expensive fabric which was normally reserved for the trimmings of dresses and corsets, and occasionally for hair-styling and cravats. This is also a ghost perhaps of some antiquity, since the heyday of Mechlin production was about a century earlier than the poem, although forty years later, Queen Victoria herself would be buried haloed in lace, some of it apparently Mechlin, like a bride awaiting her long-dead beloved Prince Albert. The greatest Mechlin lacemakers were very accomplished indeed, incorporating birds, flowers and figurative features in their designs. Mechlin is exceptionally fine, too - almost insubstantial - so that it shows up best when its whiteness is worn over the top of a darker fabric. This ghost is treading very lightly in the world, unshod, snowlike, fading, evaporative, wrapped in a fabric composed mostly of holes.

His Mien, was soundless, like the Bird -
But rapid - like the Roe -
His fashions, quaint, Mosaic -
Or haply, Mistletoe -

His conversation - seldom -
His laughter, like the Breeze
That dies away in Dimples
Among the pensive Trees -

His fashions would indeed be “Mosaic” if he was dressed in Mechlin. The larger Mechlin fabrics which still exist are all composed of smaller pieces, usually strip-shaped, stitched delicately together. Dickinson hesitated over the choice of “Mien” or “Gait” - the ghost intends, by his passage, to leave as little impression as possible, either in the form of footprints or remembered expressions. He is inscrutable, his face and wrapping as white as mistletoe berries, his movement flitting as the bird, the roe deer or the wind. He has a knack for disappearing - a sort of spiritual camouflage, an ability to die away back into himself.

Our interview - was transient -
Of me - himself was shy -
And God forbid I look behind -
Since that appalling Day!

A poet renowned for her shyness has met her match for elusiveness in this “Ghost”. There’s a pun in that last line of the poem which brings us back to its beginning, the ghost palled in a winding sheet of Mechlin, but the capitalisation also recalls the terror of the Day of Judgement. This “Ghost” lingers in the memory, and will not be looked at straight.

The poem has the air of a riddle, but the critical literature is in puzzlement as to what the solution to it may be. A snow-covered tree in a forest, a bird, the wind, have all been suggested, but Dickinson names all these in the poem itself - an odd thing to do with a riddle. Part of the joy of the poem, of course, is that its representation of beauty, silence, whiteness - and yes, too, of terror - is so broadly applicable. But I have long thought that if the poem has a solution, it is a moth - a white one - one of the ghost or swift moths, for example. Or perhaps something smaller, more delicate, wearing a pall of lace.

There are currently over a hundred and sixty described species of plume moths living in North America. They were classified as micro moths in Dickinson’s time, and they occur all over the world apart from the polar regions. One genus in particular, Pterophorus, presents itself as a delightful contender as a very specific solution to Emily Dickinson’s riddle. Known colloquially as white plume moths, Pterophorus moths are no longer in body than the digit of a finger, and their whole bodies are ghostly white. They are nocturnal, and spend their days hanging from grass stems, wings spread at right angles to their bodies in a cruciform pattern. At these times, they are almost impossible to notice, unless you are stooping and deliberately seeking them out. The shape of the outfolded wings is similar to the leaves of mistletoe, and hangs when the insect is at rest at a similar angle. The hind edges of both forewings and hindwings are finely divided, giving the insect an exquisite, microscopically detailed, lace-like appearance, enhanced by the bifurcation of the hindwings, all of which have the same Mechlin-like adornment. The antennae are exceptionally fine, the legs long, spindly, jointed, and bearing bristly tarsal appendages which add significantly to the visual complexity of these creatures, which look like animated snowflakes - the intricacies of which the microscopes of Emily Dickinson’s time were quite capable of disclosing. Were a plume moth to perch on your hand and walk about, its footsteps would feel as insubstantial as falling snowflakes, since the whole creature weighs a fraction of a gram. Such are its powers of camouflage that it will be perching on your hand moment, and be nowhere to be seen the next.

Moths themselves embody the souls of departed human spirits, according to folklore; one this small and exquisite, dressed exclusively in white, might have seemed to Dickinson like a kindred spirit. The moth itself, therefore, is a metaphor for a ghost, and we are back where we started.

There are also personal reasons why Dickinson may have chosen to write in riddles about so small a moth. In the same year, she would write a poem, “Before I got my eye put out”, which, though very like hyperbolic, does seem to suggest the beginnings of the alarming affliction which would bring her close to blindness in later life. She writes of how her “Heart / Would split” to be able to see the sky, the meadows, the mountains and the stars. How appropriate, then, if she felt her sight was failing, to riddle on so exquisite and tiny an insect, perhaps remembered from childhood, scarcely daring to spell it out straight, for fear of looking behind, like Lot’s wife, and exchanging the transience of snow for the cold white permanence of a sightless pillar of salt. Such microscopic visions would come to sustain a monumental lifetime’s work, and for all that fear of looking behind, Dickinson excelled at the art of finding both the abject and the sublime in the tiniest of creatures, and turning the transient eternal.

Zero at the Bone

Adam was well named, for we thought he was a rascal and a sinner. My first memory of him was the sight of Adam clambering back over the fence after he had been caught trespassing in the garden. He was as wild as the little rabbit kitten he had been raising, which also once escaped into our garden, perhaps to cavort with Benji, my own, rather larger rabbit. I took one look at Adam’s rabbit, which was an identical colour to my own, and rushed inside, shouting, “Mummy, Benji’s shrunk!”, until Benji himself lolloped out of the undergrowth and stood beside Adam’s little runaway.
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As Adam grew older, his misdemeanours grew proportionally in magnitude. I was, by comparison, very naive, and I was very surprised and bemused some years later when he tried to sell me a foil sausage full of weed. I asked him how much he wanted for it, and he said, “twenty bucks”. Twenty dollars was, at that time, more money than I had ever dreamed of. Not that I would have dared to smoke his grass anyway - or even known that smoking was what you do with it.

Adam and I did, however, have one thing in common. We both liked, in that era before wild things became so rare that it became so criminal to disturb them, to turn over stones. We’d been watching far too much of Harry Butler. Across the road from our houses in suburban Canberra, there was an area of “waste-land”, a veritable “brown-field” site covered with tussocky grass, and stones - oh, so many stones. Some of the stones were small, and I could manage these myself, but others were massive, and the two of us would labour at them, levering them with sticks of ancient, ringbarked gumtrees. Mostly, the things we found underneath them were cockroaches, or the larvae of Christmas beetles, which we thought were the real witchetty grubs. Sometimes - quite often, in fact - there were lizards: slippery brown and gold skinks which surrendered their tails if you grabbed them in the wrong place (we never grabbed them in the wrong place), and bluetongues which liked to be fed on snails and bananas. Once - I would have been about ten years old at the time - as Adam squatted and strained to roll over a stone, I felt a strange electricity running through my skeleton, and when the stone lay overturned, there was a snake.

It was, admittedly, a very little snake, but I wasn’t going to risk anything by touching it. Everything in my being was tingling. I knew that pythons were non-venomous, but this wasn’t a python, and just about every other Australian snake I knew was venomous to some degree. But Adam plunged straight at it, and grabbed it expertly behind the jaw. To this day, I don’t know how I let him persuade me to take it home and keep it for a “pet”. Perhaps it was because I knew that the “waste land” was due to be annexed to the local horticultural centre, and turned into lawn: no place for snakes. But whatever the reason, the two of us marched off to my place: Adam ahead of me, the snake with its centimetre width of mouth wide open, its whiplash body coiled around his fingers; me trailing behind, trying to think of more excuses for not taking the snake home. Not that I was a coward. Secretly, half of me did want to after all, because I wanted to identify it.

Believe it or not, my parents were used to this sort of thing, so when we got to my place, my father dug out an old fish-tank which we could use as a terrarium, and the snake was soon installed inside it. For a while it seemed sleepy, and sat basking under the fish-tank light, but gradually it began to wake up.

We first knew for sure that we were in for trouble when my father walked past the tank later the day, and the snake reared up like a cobra and struck at the side of the tank. A thin trickle of venom ran down the glass, and that electrical sensation was there in my bones again, followed by a strange sort of deadness which I now know was a sense of looming doom. At last we got out the identification guides. Eventually, we found it: a thin little straw coloured snake with a head the colour of chocolate. Adam had brought a baby brown snake into our house. Only a baby, perhaps, but still one of the deadliest snakes in the world, and probably with less control than an adult of the species over how much venom it might inject when angered. We knew then that we would have to release it as soon as possible, so we went away to discuss where, and how.

When we returned, the snake was gone, and the cover-glass slipped to one side at the top of the tank. It took us hours to search under every chair and table, behind the curtains, under the fridge. Eventually we found it, curled on top of a plastic bag in my mother’s sewing room. Of course, Adam had gone home by this stage, and it was left to my father to put on some thick leather gloves and pick up the snake, holding it behind the jaw, just like Eric Worrell, the famous herpetologist, whom I worshipped.

The next thing a normal family would do would be to get the snake out of the house as soon as possible, but we weren’t a normal family. The next thing we did was to get the camera. My father was still holding the snake, so he couldn’t take the photograph. My mother had suddenly shown considerable enthusiasm for cleaning behind the fridge. So it was me with the camera, doing one of my very first macro shots, as the snake’s tongue flickered blackly against its tiny, scaly lips. My fingers trembled, but I mastered myself, held the camera steady, and pressed the shutter. While I did it, that electrical pulse was running down my skeleton, from the orbits of my skull to my metatarsals, like when a strange lightning seizure would overtake my old black and white TV, zeroing down the screen, culminating in sudden blackness.

And then, I seem to remember, without another word, my father still carrying the snake, we all walked back out to the stone, and after I rolled it back into place, the lithe little fellow wove his long, dry, stubble-coloured body back to where his home was - and there was me realising for the first time that we had all just done something very, very stupid.

*

There are two species of venomous snake in New England, both now endangered: the timber rattlesnake and the copperhead. Both are pit vipers, so named because they have pit organs - heat-sensitive cavities between the nose and eye which enable them to detect warm-blooded prey. Because of this, they know you long before they see you. Copperheads have hourglass-shaped patterns of lighter and darker scales running the lengths of their bodies - alternating zones of burnished and tarnished copper. Timber rattlesnakes are more variable in colour - some almost black, others mottled dark brown and a buff yellow the colour of the dry stalks of wheat or barley. Copperheads like lowland areas, and tend to frequent the edges of meadows. They love habitats which are a mosaic of marshland, grassland and streams. Timber rattlesnakes like more mountainous areas, but they too come down to frequent wetlands and fields.

When Emily Dickinson wrote in 1865:

A narrow Fellow in the Grass
Occasionally rides -

she could therefore have been writing about either species.

Her poem is in the form of a riddle - one which instantly identifies the snake as a member of the fellowship of living things - using the colloquial language of a social introduction, but also with a broken syntax which suggests the shock, or thrill, of the encounter:

You may have met him? Did you not
His notice instant is -

It is not the human observer who owns the power of “notice”, it is the snake, who, when seen, becomes the sole object of attention as the instinct of self-preservation kicks in. The snake is going about his own business, gliding through the grass, and it is the movement of the grass itself under the influence of his body which is the first thing Dickinson notices:

The Grass divides as with a Comb,
A spotted Shaft is seen,
And then it closes at your Feet
And opens further on -

She oscillates between the passive voice (“is seen”) and the active (“it closes at your feet”), because this moment is, of course, both an archetypal one and one of very specific, personal danger, but the snake is already “further on”, as we know from the echo of his passing in the vibration of the grass stems. By the time the “spotted Shaft” has registered on the human consciousness as a snake, the danger has passed.

Then comes the cascade of memory - as it does for me whenever I have a serendipitous encounter with a snake: the sudden rushing catalogue of all the other encounters we have been through and survived. In my case, these include two dugites I have seen departing from the edges of paths in the past week, their bodies about as thick as my wrist, a tiger snake which lay coiled in front of me and began to raise its neck and swell its hood before I beat a hasty retreat some time last year, another dugite which once crossed a path between both my feet and my dog’s in mid-stride whilst I was walking to the beach, talking on my mobile phone to a friend I was dating at the exact instant when she broke up with me - and it never paid me or my dog any heed - and digging back much further into my memory, harmless grass snakes which weaved their bodies in and out of the crevices in a drystone wall beside a stream in an English village, and, when I was a child living in eastern Australia, a red-bellied black snake which passed straight by my mother, entered a pond and swam away across it.

He likes a Boggy Acre -
A Floor too cool for Corn -
But when a Boy and Barefoot
I more than once at Noon

Have passed I thought a Whip Lash
Unbraiding in the Sun
When stooping to secure it
It wrinkled And was gone -

There it is again - the archetypal generalisation which is Snake, and the sudden irruption of the individual reptile, with a confession not dissimilar from my own. In her childhood innocence, in a moment when gender was a choice and not an imposition, barefoot and vulnerable, she once stooped to “secure” a snake, but it chose to avoid her. It happens at “Noon” - a favourite moment for Dickinson, and one which anticipates the coming “Zero”. In ‘A Clock Stopped’, a poem which specifically addresses the moment when death stops the clockwork which is a human life, she describes the moment of Noon as “degreeless”. Here it is a moment when the barefoot “Boy” who was Emily Dickinson could easily have met with death. “It wrinkled” when she reached for it, so “And” deserves a capital, because what happens next may spell life or death for her.

Yet the focus of these stanzas is not so much on the snake’s power to deal death, but on his habits and preferences, and on his beauty. He “likes a Boggy Acre”, which is true: wetlands are havens for frogs and rodents, both of which snakes love to eat. He doesn’t just frequent it; he “likes” it, as he likes the feel of “A Floor too cool for Corn” on his belly, which he has previously warmed up in the morning sun. He is a “Whip Lash / Unbraiding in the Sun”, a thing of beauty which a child might impulsively stoop to secure. But some time later, she learnt, as we all should, to give the snake respect, as a member of “Nature’s People” who must not be underestimated:

Several of Nature’s People
I know, and they know me
I feel for them a transport
Of Cordiality

But never met this Fellow
Attended or alone
Without a tighter Breathing
And Zero at the Bone.

Zero at the bone. That is what I felt that day, when Adam stooped to pick up the baby brown snake, again when its venom ran down the glass of the terrarium, and once more as I gathered my nerves to focus the camera, adjust the f-stop and press the shutter. Zero is the moment when we realise, in the words of the Gregorian chant, “Media vita in morte sumus” - “In the midst of life we are in death”. It is a moment when the evidence of our senses tells us that we are woven into the natural order of things, subject to instincts, susceptible to venoms, and capable of being entranced by beauty simultaneously with the moment of our terror. It ought to be the moment when we acknowledge that Nature has the power, and not us, and the more we meddle, the less we really know. We may profess knowledge, but there comes a moment when all of us step out barefoot into an unknown, degreeless Noon.

*

Doubtless, there were reasons why Adam seemed to me to be a rascal and a sinner. His mother was a Polish immigrant, effectively a refugee. I was already taller than her at the time of the encounter with the brown snake. Adam’s father was nowhere to be seen. His brother, who made vast surrealist paintings in the style of Hieronymus Bosch, was in trouble with the police for manufacturing amphetamines. I was too young to understand that it would take far worse things than a hibernating venomous snake, and a feeling of Zero at the bone, to stop him taking a risk. He had secured the sleeping snake with expert precision. And now that I think about it, as Adam was carrying the snake out of its element toward our house - a terrible thing to do to a creature so wild, but not so terrible as to kill a snake, which is what too many people do - and as I kept him company down the path through the head high, wheat-coloured grass, there was nothing deliberately malicious about his action. It was misguided, but probably innocent. And I remember how he kept raising the snake up in his hands and looking in its eye as its tongue began to flicker. I doubt very much whether the snake was sharing his emotion, but eye to eye with the reptile, Adam’s face was that of a young man transported, whether by the risk and danger itself, or by something deeper.

I suspect he had experienced his own share of human venom. Beside it, this tête-à-tête with a brown snake was something like - Cordiality.

I stood in the eye of the Bronze Age chalk hill-figure, the White Horse of Uffington - a place where it is sensible to make a wish - and stared out across the Vale in a state of total exhilaration, Faringdon Folly concealed by trees in the distance to my left, and the bulging chimneys of the since-demolished Didcot Power Station to my right, half hidden under haze. That is when, my mother swears, an updraft gust of wind surged under my coat and lifted me from my feet. I remember the momentary sense of buoyancy, up there above the world, and then the gentle letting-down. It was a sensation I had only felt previously in dreams - mounting an air-drawn staircase - carried away.

And so throughout my life I have been a seeker-out of wind - the elemental force that brings me out exultant and sends others scurrying for shelter. On the Isles of Scilly, winter gales would stop the shipping and the planes, until the shelves in the supermarket on the most populous of the five inhabited islands, St. Mary’s, were almost empty of supplies. I would walk out towards the Garrison, fortified for centuries with a castle, and with walls built of great blocks of granite. Looking out towards the once-inhabited island of Samson, I would see seals cavorting in the water, only metres away from where waves exploded against the rocks then surged back in white runnels, seething. At the far northwest of the Garrison was a Second World War machine gun emplacement, strafed by nothing but wind, and at the far southwest of it was an ugly concrete “pillbox”, an observation post with a long rectangular slit in its structure looking out across the deep channel between St. Mary’s and the jagged coast of St. Agnes, upon whose beaches it is still possible to pick up terracotta beads from the cargoes of foundered sailing ships. There I would sit for hours as wind and spray blasted the concrete and the stone, the bell clanging arrhythmically on the mid-channel buoy. Afterwards, hands and nose numb with cold, but with my spirits leaping like salmon, I would walk back home via Porthcressa, a beach with a strong sea-wall and a row of houses beyond it, to find that the ocean had festooned the first-floor balconies with kelp and bladder-wrack. Beyond, on the headland called Peninnis, which has a squat little lighthouse, the spray could be seen hurling itself twice as high as the cliffs, describing arcs which would themselves be caught by wind and twisted - some of the water whirled, it seemed, back up into the atmosphere - some of it thrashed against the granite. It was difficult to even stand, so I would find a crag to cling to, and I would watch euphoric - my spirits carried away. When my extremities were numb with cold, I would hurry home, loaded to the muzzle with inspiration. And then would come the poems.

*

Emily Dickinson, it seems, experienced just such exhilarating winds in 1864 - a buffeting, godlike thunderstorm which caused considerable destruction, beginning with an ominous overture:

The Wind begun to rock the Grass
With threatening Tunes and low -
He threw a Menace at the Earth -
Another, at the Sky -

She considered the verb “knead” instead of “rock” - a word more suggestive of creative potential. She may have thought, too, of the wind as the symbol of inspiration in the Book of Acts: “inspiration”, sharing the same root as “respiration”. This wind, personified by her choice of pronoun, being invisible, causes objects to throw themselves around, dancing to those “threatening Tunes”, seemingly by their own volition:

The Leaves unhooked themselves from Trees
And started all abroad -
The Dust did scoop itself like Hands
And throw away the Road -

Dickinson gives the “Leaves” and the “Dust” the active voice, unhooking and scooping themselves. Inspiration shares this characteristic with wind, too: we see the outward signs of its actions, rather than its actual workings. The wind is, as Seamus Heaney would write more than a century later, “a huge nothing”, but one which shapes trees and causes us to “build our houses squat” if we live on an island. Both wind and inspiration defy, in their invisible power, the solidity of human endeavours - they “throw away the road”, destroying, deconstructing, creating anew. The wind is the sublime writ invisible: a vehicle of beauty and terror which emphatically puts us in our insignificant place.
The analogy persists in the line that follows, for anyone who has witnessed the enthusiasms of evangelical preachers -

The Wagons quickened on the streets

- for in their language, the “quickening” is the coming of the Holy Spirit, breathing life into scripture when an inspired believer reads it. But Emily Dickinson is not reading scripture - she is reading the natural world, and like the Dust, she is carried away. There is something of the thrill of watching a predator hunting in seeing the storm unleash its lightning:

The Thunder hurried slow -
The Lightning showed a yellow Beak
And then a livid Claw -

It is like the plunging stoop of a Peregrine Falcon, which has a yellow cere about its beak, or the lightning strike of a Bald Eagle, whose bill is yellow through and through. Pierced by the talons of inspiration, Dickinson magnifies the storm to Biblical proportions:

The Birds put up the Bars to Nests -
The Cattle clung to Barns -
Then came one Drop of Giant Rain
And then as if the Hands
That held the Dams, had parted hold,
The Waters wrecked the Sky,
But overlooked My Father’s House -
Just quartering a Tree -

We cling; Nature flings - and shears off the ending of the poem, leaving that last phrase hanging, with its overtones of execution, and then we hit that devastating ambiguity: the wind “overlooked My Father’s House”, and wonder whether this means “overlooked” as at the first Passover, or “overlooked” in one final sulphur-irised look of triumph before the death-dealing stoop.

Perhaps the memory of this wind was still fresh in 1883, when she returned to the theme, or perhaps there was another. This time, it came “like a Bugle”, and “quivered through the Grass… We barred the Windows and the Doors / As from an Emerald Ghost”, as it carried fences away and caused the bell in the church steeple to tell its flying tidings:

How much can come
And much can go,
And yet abide the World!

And the dizzying calling of the poet is to cling to the glorious wreckage, sing praise, and let her words be carried away.

*

As Dickinson’s poetic gift matured, it was as though she gained the confidence to let the wind blow through her verse and rip it half-apart. In 1864, she took a letter-opener to an envelope, picked up a pencil, wrote “The long Arms”, then changed her mind, crossed these words out, turned the paper upside down and scrawled on the first column of its inside:

The spry Arms
of the Wind
If I could
crawl between
I have an errand
imminent
To an adjoining
Zone -
I should not
care to stop,
My Process is
not long

The “adjoining Zone” to which only the wind can carry her may be the zone from which poems emerge – or it may be the world of the dead. Or, perhaps, these two worlds are one and the same, but whatever is the case, there is something childlike in the undertaking of this “errand” which requires her to “crawl between” the arms of the wind, like Alice going down the rabbit hole. On a literal level, we can tell that the “Process is not long”, because Dickinson has written this first column of the poem neatly, without erasure, but if this is a dalliance with death as much as with the Muse, there is every reason not to linger. On the other side of the crease in the opened-out envelope, she has added, more tentatively:

The Wind could
wait without the
Gate
Or stroll the
Town among.
To ascertain
the House
And is the Soul
at Home
And hold the
Wick of mine to
It

And then, on the front of the envelope, dodging the place where the correspondent had written her name, she has completed the poem:

To light, and
then return -

It becomes unclear whether the Wind is her servant or her master. She expects it to loiter in the Town whilst she has her audience with the Soul it has taken her to visit, or, her annotations suggest, while she ascertains “if the Soul’s at home”, but she is not going to be able to return without it. And then we realise why she has taken this journey: to hold the Wick of the candle of her own Soul to the Wick of this other one, and share a flame.

The wind is an odd mode of transportation to choose if one’s object is the transference of a flame; the wind might blow it out, or fan it to a blaze, but there were flames above the heads of the Disciples at Pentecost. Twelve years earlier, in 1852, she had witnessed a fire which threatened to engulf several buildings in Amherst. In a letter to her brother, Austin, she wrote, “At about three in the afternoon Mr. Kimberly’s barn was discovered to be on fire; the wind was blowing a gale directly from the west, and having had no rain, the roofs [were] dry as stubble. Mr. Palmer’s house was charred - the little house of father’s - and Mr. Kimberly’s also. The [fire] engine was broken, and it seemed for a while as if the whole street must go… If there must be a fire, I’m sorry it couldn’t wait until you had got home, because you seem to enjoy such things so very much…” The Wind of inspiration sets the Disciples speaking in tongues; it may also cause a conflagration in the heart of the poet. It may whisk her off to the realm of the dead and leave her there, but that is the risk that any poet must take: to allow herself to be carried away.

*

The previous year, in one of her most enigmatic and arresting poems, Dickinson found another, equally powerful extended metaphor for the lurking creative – or destructive – potential that is latent in the poet:

My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun -
In Corners - till a Day
The Owner passed - identified -
And carried Me away -

Cornered and closeted, the woman who harbours a poetic gift sits there gathering dust, shut up in prose, but loaded, aching to go off. In the lines that follow, it is tempting to read a wry reference to Sir Thomas Wyatt’s poems, ‘Whoso list to hunt? I know where is an hind!’, and ‘They flee from me that sometime did me seek’, which draw an analogy between his amorous pursuit of women, including Anne Boleyn, and the hunting of deer in the royal forests:

And now We roam in Sovreign Woods -
And now We hunt the Doe -
And every time I speak for Him
The Mountains straight reply -

… yet it is not the felling of the quarry that is important to Dickinson, but the explosive, echoing report when the gun is fired. She has been carried away, and now, she has been given a devastating, death-dealing voice - one which spews fire like a volcano:

And do I smile, such cordial light
Opon the Valley glow -
It is as a Vesuvian face
Had let it’s pleasure through -

The gun may be many a swaggering male hunter’s extension of his own phallus, but Dickinson entirely subverts this ridiculous notion: when after a long gestation the poem is triggered, it erupts into incandescence and noise, all that latent potential in the gunpowder suddenly released. Once again, the “business is not long” – the poem is suddenly there in a blaze, echoing down the ages. And now, in a daring flourish, the gun is also the “Master’s” bedfellow, its barrel sharing his pillow as he sleeps:

And when at Night - Our good Day done -
I guard My Master’s Head -
‘Tis better than the Eider Duck’s
Deep Pillow - to have shared -

To foe of His - I’m deadly foe -
None stir the second time -
On whom I lay a Yellow Eye -
Or an emphatic Thumb -

We’ve seen the predatory, falcon-like “yellow beak” and “livid claw” before, in the lightning power of inspiration. Perhaps there is something else that is latent in Dickinson the loaded gun: an anger at having been imprisoned in prose, and left propped up in the corner for so long. And now, the muzzle warm after firing, the gun’s report echoes down the centuries.

Though I than he - may longer live
He longer must - than I -
For I have but the power to kill,
Without - the power to die -

*

Since my move to Australia some years ago, my attitude towards the wind has begun to change. I’m still enthralled, my spirits carried away, by a cold winter wind on a beach with the sand lashing my face. But I know that a hot wind in summer may carry fire, and as the planet warms, such fires are a yearly reality - a wind-borne torrent which can easily deprive human beings of their properties, and humans and animals of their lives. In 2020, on the beach at Mallacoota in Victoria, where I used to holiday as a child, townsfolks dispossessed by wind-driven fire waited at the ocean’s edge, the air around them deep orange with the colour of the flames, to be taken off by naval boats in scenes reminiscent of Dunkirk. The main street of Cobargo in New South Wales, another village I remember from childhood holidays, was razed to the ground.

The aboriginal cultures which held sovereignty over this land for more than forty thousand years knew how to handle fire; we do not, and the more we destroy native vegetation in fear of winds spreading fire, the fewer plants there will be to release water into the atmosphere through transpiration, and the less inland rainfall there will be. Wind is inspiration; it is also terror, sulphurous of eye and bill, and livid of claw. It can kindle the ember of a poem and warm the soul, or, in a holocaust of incandescence, it can carry away everything we love. If, in the twenty-first century, we want our world to abide, we must become great respecters of the wind. In the corner, the loaded gun leans against the wall, waiting to be carried away.

What Mystery Pervades a Well!

The Chalice Well, on a small hillside beneath Glastonbury Tor, Somerset, gushes with water at the rate of 25, 000 gallons per day, and has not ceased to do so for at least two thousand years. It is Joseph of Arimathea’s proverbial hiding place for the Holy Grail, still bloody from catching the gush from Christ’s side at the Crucifixion, but given the well’s prodigious flow of iron-rich water, it feels as though the stone and earth itself is a kind of Grail. The water, which half-way down the hill gushes out of a sculptured lion’s head into a drinking glass, tastes of rusty swords, or of blood. As you walk up from there to the well itself, there is a trough where pilgrims can take off their shoes and stand amid the flow. Dancing with a blue reflected light, flitting like spirits of electricity, the water is unspeakably cold, painful to the bones after a few seconds of immersion. You stand among the eddies, your nerves jangling, wondering how long you can take it, as it cleanses, heals, absolves, and spurts like hope or living luck out of every crack and orifice of rock.

At the top of the steep garden, the well out of which all this water flows is lidded with a beautiful wooden and wrought-iron well-cover designed by Frederick Bligh Bond, in the interlocking circles of a Vesica Piscis, and the interior walls are draped with hart’s-tongue ferns and mosses - but it is the water itself that mesmerises. Emanating from somewhere deep, there is a sound of constant trickling. The surface of the water itself is an inscrutable dark mirror, reflecting your own face between the squares of the twisted iron-grille as you lean over into the shade - and the foliage of the surrounding trees above you wavers in your vision. Leaves have fallen into the water, too, and turned yellow. They drift across your sight like aimless golden fishes, or barges carrying souls to Avalon. You kneel and stare, floating in some ethereal zone between the peace evoked by the sound of running water, and the terror of bottomlessness. Time dissolves.

During my time living on the islands of Britain, I became an obsessive seeker after springs and wells. There was St. Warna’s Well on St. Agnes in the Isles of Scilly, a granite cyst surrounded by fleshy spikes of navelwort, into which hungry islanders once were accustomed to throw bent pins - sympathetic magic intended to cause shipwrecks. Near to my grandmother’s home in Staffordshire, the well in the village of Endon was decorated, or “dressed”, once a year with exquisite, detailed pictures made of flowers. The well tucked behind the church, among the graves in Binsey, Oxfordshire, is said to have sprung into existence when the young St. Frideswide, on the run from a king whose sexual attentions were unwanted, sought refuge amongst the poplars, and discovered that the local nuns were tired of walking to the river for their drinking water. Its water wells up at the bottom of a little staircase leading into the ground, approximately to grave-depth.

And then there were the natural springs, like Swallowhead, not far from the gigantic henge and stone circle of Avebury, which I approached always bare-footed, leaving my wet footprints behind on the recumbent sarsen stones which spanned the source of the River Kennet. It gushed straight out of the white chalk, and coursed past an ancient cleft willow tree, its branches trailing with clouties.

Near Uffington, where I lived for several years, the little River Ock had several sources, and my dog and I sought them out systematically. The most enchanting of them was right beneath the massive chalk combe at the base of White Horse Hill, in a wooded quagmire fenced off fiercely with barbed wire - the water shooting horizontally out of an old metal pipe as if from a fire hose - more of it oozing out of cracks in the chalk - then coursing off darkly through the fallen box-tree branches and the snow. I decided to follow the Ock from there to its confluence with the River Thames, trespassing or evading bulls where necessary, and in the process, I began to see the whole landscape in a new way: road-defying maps forming in my mind of all the places where water arose from underground, or weaved its way through ditches and into the river. And I began staring into welling water as a matter of habit - not divining the future, but divining the liminal status of my own spirit.

With this enduring fascination came an affinity for those poems of Seamus Heaney’s which obsessed themselves with ground water: the “blind neighbour… / Who played a piano all day in her bedroom. / Her notes came out to us like hoisted water / Ravelling off a bucket at the wellhead”; the “goddess” who steeped the ritually strangled Iron Age Tollund Man in peaty water, and “tightened her torc upon / And opened her fen, / Those dark juices working / Him to a saint’s kept body”; and most of all the soil and water in eternal suspension in the ‘Bogland’, out of which “the skeleton / of the Great Irish Elk” was dug, “An astounding crate full of air” - peaty water which “might be Atlantic seepage. The wet centre is bottomless.” The water that oozes up might connect us to the other side of the world, or the otherworld, or an other world entirely. A well - an ancient but ephemeral structure, made only of stone - may be a conduit for it, but cannot contain it.

*

Emily Dickinson’s own fascination with wells and water-sources developed over time, as she moved from confronting the metaphor of “living water” in the Gospels to regarding the abyss at the bottom of the well as a mirror on the beauty and terror of the infinite. In 1863, she adopted the form of a riddle with the answer in the first line:

“I know Where Wells grow - Droughtless Wells -”

These wells are like the wildflowers which she sometimes picked, pressed and enclosed in letters to friends: she knows where they “grow” - they are discoveries of hers, the locations of which are kept in confidence. Even at this early stage, the wells emerge of their own accord, welling up out of the ground, even if human beings enlarge and reinforce them with stone. Part of what makes wells such hallowed places is this gentle human hemming-in of natural forces, and the way nature reclaims the stones themselves:

“Deep dug - for Summer days -
Where Mosses go no more away -
And Pebble - safely plays -

It’s made of fathoms - and a Belt -
A Belt of jagged Stone -
Inlaid with Emerald - half way down -
And Diamonds - jumbled on -”

Dickinson is not there to draw up water from the well to drink, but merely to crane her neck and stare into it, where sunlight glints on the wet leaves of mosses and liverworts on the vertical surfaces, and where the water lies, dark and deep.

“It has no Bucket - were I rich
A Bucket I would buy -
I’m often thirsty - but my lips
Are so high up - You see -

I read in an Old fashioned Book
That People “thirst no more” -
The Wells have buckets to them there -
It must mean that - I’m sure -

Shall We remember Parching - then?
Those Waters sound so grand -
I think a little Well - like Mine -
Dearer to understand -”

She is thinking, no doubt, of the fourth chapter of that “Old fashioned Book”, the Gospel of John, in which Jesus tells the Samaritan woman at the well that he has the ability to give her “living water”. “Sir,” she responds, “thou hast nothing to draw with, and the well is deep; from whence hast thou that living water?” He tells her that whoever drinks the water he has to offer “will never thirst”. The speaker of the poem, however, continues to be thirsty, staring down at the water from too “high up”. She could, perhaps, like Aesop’s crow, plop rocks into the well until the water-level rose high enough for her to reach it, but the last lines suggest that she is seeking another satisfaction entirely: a communion, or an understanding, with the well itself - with that silent staring down at an inscrutable, shadowy surface. And for this purpose, little, unknown, local wells are “Dearer” by far than larger, more grandiose ones, as any true seeker of holiness in wells is bound to discover. There, the wildflowers are not trampled, and no one mars the air with shouting. Ferns grow deeper there, and no one scrubs the lichen from the outside of the stone.

*

Dickinson returned to the subject again fourteen years later, in 1877. This time, the unreachability of the water, and the divinatory act of staring into it, becomes the central subject of the poem, and the revelation is precisely that the ways of nature are beyond human understanding.

“What mystery pervades a well!
The water lives so far -
A neighbor from another world
Residing in a jar

Whose limit none have ever seen
But just his + lid of glass - + rim
Like looking every time you please
In an abyss’s face!”

Looking into a well is like staring down the wide end of a telescope: everything is distant - removed - and fascinatingly intense - a distillation of the world. We have the same idea as in the poem from 1863 - the water “lives” and it is “far”, an alien world, of which we can only dimly see the surface. But that is the source of the fascination: we are looking on the “abyss”. The deep surface is the place where nature meets supernature and where science and human perception reach their limits. It is the place of the unconscious, where poetry begins. We respond to it either with abjection or with the joy of liberation.

“The grass does not appear afraid,
I often wonder he
Can stand so close and look so bold
At what is awe to me.

Related somehow they may be,
The sedge stands next the sea
Where he is floorless
And does no timidity betray -”

This time, her meditation takes her far beyond the well itself, as the images dissolve. The humblest organisms, the grasses and the sedges, are the least afraid to approach the abyss - the least attached to their own identities. For Heaney in the twentieth century, “The wet centre is bottomless”; for Dickinson in the nineteenth, there is no room for self in the “floorless” well or ocean. That favourite word of the nineteenth century evolutionist and taxonomist, “related”, has crept in, but only as a way of saying that the view of the abyss brings human beings to the same level as the grass and sedge: to a place of unknowing, where there is nothing for it but to accept the all-pervasive mystery which saturates our understanding of the natural world as thoroughly as water saturates the stone.

“But nature is a stranger yet;
The ones that cite her most
Have never passed her haunted house,
Nor simplified her ghost.

To pity those that know her not
Is helped by the regret
That those who know her, know her less
The nearer her they get.”

Scientists and poets alike know this well: the closer you approach nature, the more prepared you are to admit how little you understand. It is still true in the modern world that many of those who “cite” nature the most are those who know her least - that supposedly enlightened adherents to “back to nature” movements can often be those who lay claim to some special understanding, but who have rarely paused to observe, let alone surrender the sense of self in the face of the abyss. The well is nature’s “haunted house”. Staring into it and listening to the running water may bring peace, but it is not the peace of understanding. It is the far more radical peace which has reconciled itself to the potential terror of the unknown.

*

Three years earlier, in 1874, Dickinson cut open a used envelope so that she could use it for drafting a poem which she would never re-cast in more formal stanzas. The poem mostly conforms to her accustomed ballad metre, but the lines are split into smaller phrases, their left-hand edge following the curved flap of the envelope.

“I never hear
that one is dead
Without the chance
of Life
Afresh annihilating me
that mightiest Belief
too mighty for the
daily mind
that tilling it’s abyss,
Had Madness, had
it once or, twice
the yawning Consciousness.

Beliefs are Bandaged
like the tongue
When Terror
were it told
In any tone"

To the right of these words, on the folded-out interior of the envelope, the poem is completed:

"commensurate
Would strike
us instant
Dead -
I do not know
the man so
bold
He dare
in lonely
place
that awful
stranger -
Consciousness
Deliberately
face -”

It is, perhaps, the missing link between the two poems about wells. One may draw up “living water” from a well; one may equally face death by staring down into it. There is a paradox here: if we are to genuinely face up to “Consciousness”, it is going to be a terrifying thing, because to be conscious, we must recognise our own insignificance, and face the fact that most of our existence lies beneath the dark mirror of the surface - in the unconscious. Life is a moment between annihilations.

Perhaps, therefore, it is not just our gratefulness for the gift of water that has inspired cultures throughout history and across the world to develop the custom of throwing votive offerings into springs and wells. We offer things of value to have them engulfed, as we are engulfed. We stare into the abyss of the well because its “belt of stone” holds together a microcosm of that other great abyss - death - and all up its walls grows the greenness of fresh life. Its bottomlessness connects us with everything, and nothing. The well is both grave and Grail, zero and infinity. We will never see the limit.

The Elf of Plants: the Mycorrhizal Movement in Dickinson and Plath

One of Emily Dickinson’s recycled envelopes, dating to around 1874, is made of brown paper, the vertical and horizontal milling marks still visible in its texture. She has tilted it on its edge, so that the draft she has pencilled onto it is in a diamond shape - a wilful refusal to be constrained by convention, even when working on a text that was probably intended for her eyes only. The poem is set out like this:

the
Mushroom
is the Elf
of Plants -
At Evening
it is not -
At morning - in a truffled
Hut
It stop opon a spot
As if it tarried always
And yet its’ whole career
Is shorter than a
Snake’s delay
And fleeter
Than a
+
tare -

We now know that mushrooms do indeed tarry always, in mycorrhizal networks underground, and that the things we call “mushrooms” and “toadstools” are merely the fruiting bodies of long-lived, often massive organisms. Some of them engage in complex symbiotic relationships with plants, including trees, and act like a subterranean communication system within woodlands. “Mycelium,” writes the mycological expert Merlin Sheldrake, “describes the most common of fungal habits, better thought of not as a thing, but as a process - an exploratory, irregular tendency.”

Fungi are the pagans and heretics of the natural world: neither plants nor animals, refusing to photosynthesise, eschewing vascular systems, thriving amid nuclear fallout, bending human minds. They are heterodox tares growing amongst the conservative wheat. The Biblical serpent might have thought them suitable ephemeral landmarks beside which to “delay”, and enticing fruits to offer. Their presence is insidious. They live on our skin, between our toes, up our noses. The tendency of fungal hyphae to explore beneath the soil by trial and error, erupting from it only to reproduce, is an analogy for underground resistance movements, and for subterranean systems of knowledge. It is a model for the way Partisans defeated Mussolini, wise-women communicated their knowledge of herbalism, midwifery and abortion, feminists won enough hearts and minds to gain the vote, and the “#metoo” movement gathered momentum before reaching its moral crescendo. It is also a very precise symbol for the way poems form in the creative human consciousness (and even unconscious) before - often quite suddenly - they explode into being: mushrooms of the mind.

*

Some eighty-six years later, Sylvia Plath published her own poem inspired by mushrooms, and like Dickinson, she began with the sudden revelation of the fruiting bodies by the first light of morning, but in the first-person collective voice of the mushrooms: “Overnight, very / Whitely, discreetly, / Very quietly // Our toes, our noses / Take hold on the loam, / Acquire the air.” Her poem emphasises the paradox of their softness and their extraordinary upward-thrusting force. The Shaggy Cap mushroom, Coprinus comatus, a deliciously soft edible species which deliquesces into spore-bearing ink when it decays, is capable of pushing up paving stones when it is emerging: “Soft fists insist on / Heaving the needles, / The leafy bedding, // Even the paving.”

Plath’s poem has often been read as an extended metaphor for the mycelial spread of the women’s liberation movement throughout the 1960s: women who are “Perfectly voiceless”, who “Diet on water, / On crumbs of shadow”, who have been accustomed to being “Bland mannered, asking / Little or nothing”, have found a way to “Widen the crannies / shoulder through holes”. It should be noted that in building this metaphor, her understanding of the natural history of fungi is also impeccable, and her choice of comparison quite possibly influenced by Emily Dickinson. Her mushroom uprising multiplies - “So many of us! / So many of us!” - an irresistible horde of “Nudgers and shovers”, “meek” and “edible”, but ready “by morning” to “Inherit the earth” - embodiments of the patience, fortitude and irresistible progress of the quiet ones vaunted by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. “Our foot’s in the door,” Plath’s mushrooms affirm prosaically as her poem ends. That inexorable appendage would not have been able to intrude so far had it not been for the fact that the walls and paving of the temple of patriarchy had already been thoroughly undermined and intertwined by the mycelia of a women’s revolution.

*

Dickinson re-drafted ‘The Mushroom is the Elf of Plants’ repeatedly. In its final form, the stanzas are set out in their orthodox rhythmic units, as the poem would ultimately be published:

“The Mushroom is the Elf of Plants -
At Evening, it is not
At Morning, in a Truffled Hut
It stop opon a Spot

As if it tarried always
And yet it’s whole Career
Is shorter than a Snake’s Delay -
And fleeter than a Tare -”

But there is nothing orthodox about the poem’s development, as Dickinson piles up metaphors in praise of the mushroom’s inexorable capacity for hidden growth and sudden manifestation above the earth:

“’Tis Vegetation’s Juggler -
The Germ of Alibi -
Doth like a Bubble antedate
And like a Bubble, hie -

I feel as if the Grass was pleased
To have it intermit -
This surreptitious Scion
Of Summer’s circumspect.

Had Nature any supple Face
Or could she one contemn -
Had Nature an Apostate -
That Mushroom - it is Him!”

When the witches respond to Macbeth’s questioning by vanishing into thin air in the third scene of Shakespeare’s play, Banquo turns to his friend and says, “The earth hath bubbles, as the water has / And these are of them. Whither are they vanished?” Mushrooms, like witches, have this quality of appearing and vanishing “Into the air, and what seemed corporal / Melted, as breath into the wind”. Dickinson’s mushroom becomes the archetypal vision of the trickster, the “Juggler” from the Tarot pack, the “Apostate” (she toyed with “Iscariot”), and as such, no doubt, it has her full approval. Its foot, too, is in the door.

*

We can be sure that Dickinson approves of the mushroom’s apostasy from the normal dogmas of the natural world, partly because her own faith resisted doctrinal formulae, and more specifically because her idea of the “Apostate” is reinforced in other poems by her approving references to witches and witchcraft. We should note in passing that Dickinson lived in the state where the Salem witch trials had reached their vindictive end almost two hundred years earlier, and that not long after Dickinson’s death, her family acquired one of the first ever mass-produced souvenir citrus spoons, commemorating that baleful bicentenary. She also lived at a time when spiritualism was not only in vogue, but had the assent of prominent public figures, including the wife of the President of the United States, and this new movement defied scientific and ecclesiastical structures. It also paradoxically empowered women, since their traditional, patriarchally-defined traits, including their supposed passivity, made them uniquely qualified to be mediums. Spiritualism may have had its roots in some of the traditions which were demonised as “witchcraft”, but it had gained a veneer of legitimacy because of this. Witchcraft, by comparison, had always been underground: a mycelial network of forbidden knowledge and belief. Two single stanza poems from late in her life tell us in no uncertain terms where Dickinson’s sympathies lay:

“Witchcraft was hung, in History,
But History and I
Find all the Witchcraft that we need
Around us, every Day -”

She found, for instance, that mushroom in her poem, and she kept the Sabbath by staying at home and listening to the Bobolinks in the garden. Witchcraft is embedded not in the spectacular or the ritualistic, but in a quiet, everyday, unassuming spirituality. And:

“Witchcraft has not a pedigree,
‘Tis early as our Breath,
And mourners meet it going out
The moment of our death - ”

In Dickinson’s later poems, witchcraft is a metaphor the calling of the poet, and the work of witchcraft is the slow mycorrhizal genesis of a poem in her brain. It precedes her and it will outlive her, but her poem is its brief, fleeting manifestation - its fruiting body. Most of its work takes place underground, scarcely observed in its early stages even by the poet. Out of these meek, humble, surreptitious origins in the humus of the poet’s unconscious, something strange, arcane and spectacular emerges. “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way?” Dickinson wrote to her mentor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and we know, from a poem about the way she was “enchanted” by the works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, that it gave her access to “a Divine insanity”, like “Tomes of solid Witchcraft”. But a poem itself has its origins in a quiet, mouldering exploration.

*

I am writing this at a moment in Australian political history when it looks as though a resounding blow may be dealt to the culture of impunity in the political establishment, specifically as it relates to the acceptance and enabling of sexual abuse in parliament. It is now becoming clear that a mycelial movement has reached a point of critical mass, and it is beginning to erupt. Women in parliament, who have long been expected to keep silent about having been raped or assaulted, have forged connections with each other, and are speaking out. Our prime-minister’s position looks increasingly tenuous as his integrity is thrown into question. Forced onto the defensive, he has blundered into pronouncements which suggest that he is only capable of understanding how rape affects a woman if he considers how it might affect his own daughter. His tone has become petulant, and he feigns a righteousness inconsistent with his previous indifference to the culture of abuse. Unknown to him, the fungal hyphae of truth have undermined his assurance. The paving has been shoved aside, and suddenly, the survivors of abuse are raising a chorus: “So many of us! / So many of us!”

The mycelial connection exists not just between individuals or within the poet’s mind. It transcends time, connecting Dickinson with Plath in its beautiful intertextual web. It descends deeper into history, embracing women who hung from gibbets or were consumed by flames. It feels its way upwards to the present, its tentative fingers transforming into battering rams. It resists erasure, subtly transforming whole landscapes of history, as the underground expansion of fairy-ring fungus is visible from the air as a darker arc of turf. Emily Dickinson saw this truth, and scribbled it on another envelope:

“Long Years apart - can make no
Breach a second cannot fill -
The absence of the Witch does not
Invalidate the spell -

The embers of a Thousand Years
Uncovered by the Hand
That fondled them when they were Fire
Will stir and understand -”

The poet reaches back through time into the fire which burned the witch. She has turned to ash long ago, and been blown away by the wind - ephemeral in body as the mushroom and its spores. But that is only superficial. Ninety-nine percent of the growth is underground, its girth slowly encompassing the world. The spell is not invalidated. The “meek” are ready to inherit.

The Wound Unbandaged

Amongst the carefully stitched “fascicles” of poems which were discovered after Emily Dickinson’s death, there were a number of fragmentary texts written on scraps of paper, mostly recycled out of bits of envelopes. Dickinson had squeezed her writing into irregular shapes - the triangular portion that folds over to seal the envelope, or an oblong form cut from the side of one, or a whole envelope ungummed and unfolded - and she often changed the text orientation, running it vertically up the sides, or cramming additional words into a scraggy corner.

These seemingly haphazard, undated relics are, on closer observation, exquisite works of art. She may have created them whilst cooking - reaching for the nearest strip of paper as inspiration struck her, or kept the pieces in her pocket as she walked or gardened, pausing to pencil-in whatever suddenly gripped her - but their very evasion of completion, their ambiguity and their visual fragmentation, seem more and more planned and purposeful the longer a reader meditates upon them.

One such fragment has been dated by R.W. Franklin to 1870. It has been written down one side of an envelope which has been cut open down the edges - the interior side of the surface which bears the recipient’s address. The first stanza has alternating eight and six syllable rhythmic lines which are split in two in order to cram Dickinson’s large writing - she was troubled by poor eyesight by this time - into the space.

“A not admitting
of the Wound
Until it grew so
wide
That all my
Life had Entered it
And there
were troughs
beside -”

They are wise and heavy words to scrawl on a scrap of ephemeral postal detritus and tuck away into a box - words so applicable to the human condition in any age. That “not admitting of the Wound” - a state of denial which can only exacerbate the condition - is a monotonously common self-destroying act, justified at the time as an act of self-defence. It is the excuse an abuse victim gives for the abuser, the fear which keeps the person with cancer symptoms away from the doctor, the refusal to admit one’s own shortcomings which only leads to their embarrassing exposure, the fear of others’ loathing that closets the heart, the burying of difficult questions about race or class or sex or gender, the acquiescence in atrocity for the sake of peace, the denial of addiction. The desperate, extended attempt to “not admit” the wound only serves to enlarge it beyond control, until, like a black hole, it consumes one’s whole being and threatens to draw others into its “troughs” of despair.

“Big my Secret but it’s bandaged”, she had written in 1861, simultaneously continuing to shroud her “Secret” in cryptic references. Bandages can assist healing, but wounds can also suppurate unnoticed beneath them. They can be unwound to reveal that the surgeon has missed the onset of gangrene and it is now too late to save the limb - or the life. They can prevent the healthy granulation and drainage of the wound. The men with stumps and disfigured faces returning from the field hospitals of the Civil War could testify to the danger of hiding one’s wounds too long behind bandages, and to the efficacy of exposing rawness to the air.

Other readers, including doctors, have offered clever diagnoses of the cause of Dickinson’s own wound: she was epileptic, she was sexually abused, she suffered from agoraphobia or seasonal affective disorder, she was emotionally maimed by lost love, she was suppressing lesbian desires or gender dysphoria. We know for certain that from youth, she was witness to a remorseless procession of premature deaths of friends and family members, and that at some point, she must have become aware that kidney disease would carry her away early too. She had a lot of pain to bandage. But Dickinson, sewing together her fascicles, and carefully locking away these repurposed envelopes, never intended to publish her poems - let alone her biography - to the world. We poetry-lovers are curious creatures, in both senses of that phrase, but we don’t always have the right to pry. We should probably avoid devaluing the work by explaining it through theorised biography, and let her poems do their work of necessary excoriation on us instead.

Three words hang disconnected beneath this stanza:

“was space
room”

and Dickinson has drawn a line under them.

Perhaps as the rest of the poem was forming in her mind, she has written two other words running vertically up what was once the bottom fold of the envelope:

“Unsuspecting Carpenters”

The remainder of the text on the envelope feels relevant to - but strangely disconnected from - the text that preceded it:

“A closing of the
simple lid that
opened to the sun
Until the tender
sovereign
Carpenter
Perpetual nail
it down -”

Jesus, that “tender sovereign”, trained as a carpenter, and might easily have learned his skill for dovetail joints on coffins in his youth. Is that what he is doing here – nailing the lid on the coffin to end the suffering – or is this lid a more “perpetual” kind of bandage, sealing in the wound for all eternity? Are his tender mercies merely a hard covering which will let the unadmitted wound fester on forever? Or is the unadmitted thing precisely what he is nailing down, so that the soul can rest in peace?

We cannot know, because the line that Dickinson drew between the stanzas is a ragged hole at the middle of the poem. The stanzas have been left disarticulated, blown apart, with spare words hanging around them haphazardly, like shrapnel embedded in flesh. And this is what makes this fragment, after a hundred readings, feel so devastatingly complete in its analysis of our human weakness: a raw confession of the haemorrhage of creativity that arose out of Dickinson’s own suppression of her pain, now treasured for a hundred and fifty years, scrawled on the obverse of an address - on a scrap rescued at the last moment from the wastepaper basket.

Out of its unbandaged centre, the poem bleeds with possibility, reminding us of how we, like the dismembered envelope, are torn.

Early in October, 1846, Eben H. Frost sat with his jaw sagging open, as his dentist, Dr. William T.G. Morton, applied the necessary torsion to rip a decayed molar from his jaw. What was extraordinary about this otherwise unnoteworthy scene was the fact that the patient did not writhe, scream or groan as the extraction took place. Nor had he lurched back in the dentist’s chair with the customary exclamations of horror as Dr. Morton approached his face brandishing the appropriate instrument, and there was not even a whimper as the medical gentleman swabbed the blood from his gums and lip. The reason, of course, was that Eben H. Frost had been anaesthetised, and Dr. William T.G. Morton was hoping to become fantastically wealthy as a result of his study.

Dr. Morton had realised that ether might work as a general anaesthetic when a colleague, Dr. Charles T. Jackson, told him that he had been using the clear, cooling, volatile liquid topically to ease pain in the teeth and gums of his patients, and that students at Harvard University were known to soak their handkerchiefs with it and sniff them in order to achieve a high. Morton started experimenting on invertebrates and small mammals, many of which died in the process, but this did not deter him from anaesthetising his dog, who also appeared to be dead for some time before recovering unchanged, apart from a certain aversion to the ether bottle, and, presumably, to his master. Eben H. Frost must have given his dentist a bit of a fright, too, when he remained unresponsive after the extraction, but this was effectively remedied by a glassful of cold water in the face.

Narcotics had been used by doctors with varying degrees of effectiveness from time immemorial. Mandrake was used to knock patients out, but they too often never awoke. Opium, in its enormously popular form, tincture of laudanum, blunted some of the pain of extractions and internal operations, and then addicted its users. At the cruder end of the spectrum, commanders of Naval vessels got their drummer boys to rap out a military tattoo close to the earholes of men whose limbs were being amputated, in a kindly effort to distract them from the pain. But ether, whilst it can cause a degree of respiratory distress, and has long been superseded now, knocked patients out completely, and gave them a more than reasonable chance of awakening with no memory of their recent trauma.

It was time for Dr. Morton to demonstrate his discovery to the world. He did so in the amphitheatre of the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, successfully anaesthetising another patient and excising a tumour from his jaw. The rest of Morton’s life was consumed with legal wranglings and lawsuits as he tried to patent and profit from a discovery that others had clearly had a hand in making. These events occurred approximately 94 miles from Emily Dickinson’s home in Amherst, and they would change the course of medicine forever, saving millions from unspeakable pain and misery.

*

Sixteen years later, in 1862, with the use of anaesthetic ether now an established medical procedure, Dickinson began a poem with a simple sentence, ending with a full-stop. This was unusual for her, but the sentence itself at first glance seems to express a conviction that countless poets, philosophers and theologians had expressed before her:

“This World is not conclusion.”

She might have had Henry Vaughan’s stupendous, visionary poem, ‘The World’, in mind, with its assertion that “I saw Eternity the other night… / And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years, / Driv’n by the spheres / Like a vast shadow mov’d; in which the world / And all her train were hurl’d.” It sounds like it might be the beginning of a doctrinal statement - an expression of the faith we know Dickinson struggled and failed to attain. An evangelist might wishfully find some sort of hope for Dickinson’s eternal soul in that sentence; she is admitting that life must go on after death, or that the facts of our material existence are not the be-all and end-all. Dickinson has already forewarned us that it can’t be as simple as that, however, by leaving out the definite article, and drawing attention to the ambiguity of the last word of the sentence. A process - a life - reaches a “conclusion”. So does a scientist at the end of an experiment. In fact, it is a sentence which seems calculated to provoke a question: “Conclusion - to what?” We could propose several different answers. This World is not the conclusion to the Creator’s experiment. Science cannot reach ultimate conclusions about the nature of this world. Worldly or empirical considerations are not the only ones which should preoccupy us when we try to reach conclusions about our ethical behaviour. The next sentence seems to confirm that Dickinson has recent scientific controversies in mind:

“A Species stands beyond -
Invisible, as Music -
But positive, as Sound -”

Dickinson, one of the more scientifically-informed poets of the nineteenth century, uses the language of science in order to suggest its limitations. “Species” already had a long history before Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, less than three years before this poem was written. Initially used simply to denote a vaguely-defined “type” of plant, animal or other organism, it came to acquire a more specific meaning when John Ray proposed in 1686 that an organism of a given species would always produce offspring of the same species. Rival scientific factions had also debated theories of the fixity of mutability of species long before Darwin; Darwin merely offered an explanation of how species might change over time. But Dickinson’s “Species” is a shadowy figure, unknowable yet somehow imaginable, which “stands” waiting for us at some portal beyond “This World”: the angels of Christian mythology, or human beings resurrected and transformed - or perhaps something totally other, such as the entities which are the origin of utterly terrifying ghost stories. Whatever it is, “Species” specifically denotes that it is something radically other, irreconcilably distinct from us, incomprehensible to human thought.

Yet science itself was increasingly making incursions into the world of the “invisible”. Static electricity was already understood, the Voltaic cell had been invented, and the language of “positive” and negative charges would have been taught to Dickinson - who seems to have favoured the study of scientific electives - in school. She teeters on the brink of considering the possibility that Death, the “undiscovered country” of Hamlet, may not always be an impenetrable mystery to science, but not for long:

“It beckons, and it baffles -
Philosophy, dont know -
And through a Riddle, at the last -
Sagacity, must go -”

The verbs emphasise the ghostlike, supernatural status of this “Species”; its disconcerting, uncanny presence destabilises Dickinson’s grammar. Science and philosophy can only be agnostic in the face of its mystery, which is best approached through the language of poetry - particularly in one of her own favoured verse forms, the “Riddle”. But unlike the “Riddles” and “puzzles” of another genre which is about to experience a surge in popularity in the later nineteenth century - the detective story - there is no possibility of a solution, either through scientific endeavour or self-sacrifice. Conventional wisdom itself must be rejected. None of us are sages. Sherlock Holmes will be able to say how Sir Charles Baskerville died, but not where he has gone now.

“To guess it, puzzles scholars -
To gain it, Men have borne
Contempt of Generations
And Crucifixion, shown -”

None of us are sages, but there is courage in the attempt to understand. Darwin was already enduring the contempt of a significant proportion of his generation as Dickinson wrote this. But if science struggles to maintain its authority in the face of death’s mystery, so does religion:

“Faith slips - and laughs, and rallies -
Blushes, if any see -
Plucks at a twig of Evidence -
And asks a Vane, the way -”

We know from a later poem that there was a weather-vane outside Dickinson’s window, the “Forefinger” of which would occasionally come into view from where she sat writing, if the direction of the wind was right. To ask it “the way” is to ignore the Apostle Paul’s warning to the Ephesians not to be “carried about by every wind of doctrine”. Faith coyly selects its “Evidence” to suit itself - a “twig” of it will do - whereas science, ideally, amasses it before reaching its conclusion. If we allow the pun to do its work, we cannot avoid the suggestion that faith itself is not exempt from the condemnation of the Preacher in the Book of Ecclesiastes when he insists that “all is vanity”.

Much Gesture, from the Pulpit -
Strong Hallelujahs roll -

The religious revivals which swept New England during Dickinson’s early life hinged on the idea that their converts received certitude of salvation, and confidence that the descriptions of the Heavenly realm in the Bible were literally true. The man (because it always was) in the pulpit gesticulated wildly under the influence of this certitude, and was buoyed into greater feats of oratory by the “Hallelujahs” of those in his audience who shared it. Anyone who has ever been in this situation and remained untouched by the enthusiasm whilst others are swept away by it will recognise the weary resignation in Dickinson’s voice - the result of a constant pressure to yield to that certitude and conform to its dogmas.
Karl Marx had already written that “Religion is the opiate of the masses” in 1844, but we have no evidence that Dickinson was aware of this. It was not, however, a new idea even then. In 1797, the Marquis de Sade has his Juliet reprove King Ferdinand for oppressing his people and fearing “the eye of genius”. That, she insists, is “why you encourage ignorance. This opium you feed your people, so that, drugged, they do not feel their hurts, inflicted by you.” The early German Romantic ‘Novalis’ developed the idea in 1798: “Their so-called religion acts merely as an opiate: irritating, numbing, calming their pain out of weakness.” “Faith” might be the anaesthetic which lulls us into thinking we have reached a “conclusion” about what lies beyond “this world”, but all the while, what it is really doing is blunting our appreciation of what science really can comprehend: the things of “this world”.

The concluding lines of Dickinson’s poem put us back into Dr. Morton’s dentist’s chair, with the ether-soaked handkerchief hovering in front of our faces as we attempt to contemplate metaphysics. The opiate can give us the certitude of oblivion, and even a degree of freedom from pain, but it cannot give us solid facts. And even then, Dickinson has a surprise for us. She is only using the dentist’s vocabulary - the situation is rather different:

“Narcotics cannot still the Tooth
That nibbles at the soul -”

Doubt, inquisitiveness, pain - all of these have this in common: they gnaw at the soul like rodents. We can face realities, or we can reach for the narcotics and let ourselves be gnawed away. It’s as true a statement in the context of modern drug-culture, or modern conspiracy theories, as it was during the transitory religious revivalism of Dickinson’s time. The “Tooth” is also that unanswerable question: “What happens to me and my loved ones after death?” I have seen people doing it: shouting “Hallelujah” at the tops of their lungs, as if they could force that impossible certitude upon themselves, desperate for their anodyne. And all the time, the “Tooth” nibbles on, nightmarish, incomprehensible, strangely animal - a Species in its own right.

We have a choice whether or not we take those narcotics and let the Tooth nibble on. Dickinson’s poetry gives us another option – it’s there in her exquisite attention to sound and rhythm, in her evident joy at the arrival of Bobolinks and Robins, in her determination to keep the Sabbath in her own garden. We can embrace this World. And if we do that, there is a moral imperative that we must treasure and conserve it, and not be anaesthetised to the threats it faces as a result of our own activity - the fact, for example, that Hemlock trees are facing extinction because of an aphid imported to the United States by horticulturalists, and that the best hope for their species is the introduction of the Hemlock Woolly Adelgid’s natural beetle predators.

Accept that although this world is not conclusion, this world is all that we can know, and we are ethically bound to listen to science.

Of Bobolinks, Orioles and Hummingbirds

In Audobon’s Birds of America, the Baltimore Orioles have built their pendulous nest, woven out of moss, in the branches of a flowering Tulip Tree. A female claws the side of the nest, interacting with a male perching on a branch beneath her. Above them, another male displays the full glory of his plumage, cavorting in front of his mate. His head, nape and back are velvety black, his wings are pied, and the colour on the rest of his body is every shade from a pale yellow to the colour of egg yolk – yolk, that is, from a hen which has been permitted to scavenge in the garden for a few days: a rich, honeyed amber. He is depicted in the act of dropping from one branch to another, his wings partially spread. To complement this glorious image, Audobon asks us to imagine a traveller in the wilderness who “might feel pleased with any sound, even the howl of the wolf, or the still more dismal bellow of the alligator,” but who, on hearing “thousands of musical voices” from a tree full of Orioles, is led “first to the contemplation of the wonders of nature, and then to that of the Great Creator himself.”

Then, there is his illustration of the Ruby-Throated Hummingbird – or ten of them to be precise – males and females, perching with tiny feet, drinking nectar, airborne, with their beaks down trumpet-flowers, twisting their necks to touch bills. He has taken care to capture some of the males with the gemstone-bright iridescence at their throats, and he asks, “where is the person… who, on observing this glittering fragment of the rainbow, would not pause, admire, and instantly turn his mind with reverence toward the Almighty Creator?”

Finally, we should consider his illustration and discussion of the Bobolink. He tells us that they are called Bobolinks, an onomatopoeic name imitating their voices, in the State of New York, but are elsewhere known as Meadow-birds, Reed-birds and Rice Buntings. He calls them Rice Birds. In his illustration, the Bobolinks sit in branches of the maple tree. It is autumn, because claret-coloured key-shaped seeds dangle from the twigs. The twig on which the female sits has snapped under her weight, and she is staring fixedly at something which has attracted her attention far beneath her. The male is clambering imperiously up a branch above her, his throat extended in the act of calling, showing no apparent interest in the female. His wings are held low, his tail splayed, and it is hard to resist describing his expression as haughty or even arrogant. Unusually for a picture by Audobon, the colours do not do justice to the living bird. Audobon admits that “their song… is extremely interesting, and emitted with a volubility bordering on the burlesque”. He does not go so far, however, as to suggest that the song and spectacle must inevitably lead every observer to rapt contemplation of the glory of the Creator.

Instead, he turns his discussion to the damage Bobolinks do to crops, and to the “profitability” of shooting them in large numbers. “At the discharge of a gun, a flock sufficient to cover several acres rises en masse, and performing various evolutions, densely packed, and resembling a sultry cloud, passes over and near the sportsman, when he lets fly, and finds occupation for some time in picking up the dozens which he has brought down at a single shot. One would think that every gun in the country has been put in requisition. Millions of these birds are destroyed, and yet millions remain… Their flesh is extremely tender and juicy.”

*

It might have come as a surprise, therefore, to any of Emily Dickinson’s friends who happened to read what would become one of her most famous poems, that Bobolinks were not excluded from her private garden liturgy, but were considered by her to be foremost amongst avian worshippers of the divine.

“Some keep the Sabbath going to Church -
I keep it, staying at Home -
With a Bobolink for a Chorister -
And an Orchard, for a Dome -”

With a Bobolink for a chorister, Dickinson’s garden sacraments would have been by turns joyful, melodious and raucous. The song of the Bobolink is an extraordinary torrent of extemporised sparrow-like chirps, flinty chips, resonant, metallic squawks with a deeper, blackbirdish undertone, chinking chortles and piercing whistles. A Bobolink can sound by turns delighted, comically bossy and transported with hilarity. There is nothing Puritanical in a Bobolink’s worship.

“Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice -
I, just wear my Wings -
And instead of ringing the Bell, for Church,
Our little Sexton - sings.

God preaches, a noted Clergyman -
And the sermon is never long,
So instead of getting to Heaven, at last -
I’m going, all along.”

We may tend to think of a Sexton primarily as a gravedigger, but in fact, the word shares its root with “Sacristan”, the facilitator of worship in a church, and literally, “the custodian of sacred objects”. Sextons cut lawns, order supplies, wear a cassock and surplice not dissimilar in colour and form to a male Bobolink’s plumage, and most importantly from Dickinson’s point of view, they make sure that the church is lit, decorated and dusted for the principal events of the liturgical calendar. Bobolinks set the seasonal calendar in Dickinson’s Amherst, beginning to arrive in late March or early April, breeding throughout the central and eastern portion of the North American continent, and leaving for central South America – northern Argentina and southern Brazil - between late July and late September. They are birds with predictable migratory habits, following the same route as their ancestors north through the Greater Antilles, on up the Florida peninsula to their breeding grounds and back again every year. Their services in Dickinson’s orchard were timed to coincide with the flowering of the trees and the maturation of their fruit.

The poem is, of course, a refusal to go to the local church built by Homo sapiens, in preference for the domed grandeur of a garden shimmering not with stained glass, but with birdsong and sunlight. Whilst the sight of a flock of Bobolinks made Dickinson’s contemporaries reach for their guns, it made her feel as though she, too, was wearing their wings. We will return to the Bobolink shortly - Dickinson is by no means finished with delighting in him – but first, we should see what she has to say about the birds Audobon implicitly prefers.

*

Dickinson’s poem inspired by the Baltimore Oriole’s song presents the perception of its beauty as a subjective and emotional decision on the part of human beings, just as our response to a poem itself is dependent on our own personalities. Once again, the bird gives her a reason to distance herself from the normal attitudes of the churchgoing public:

“To hear an Oriole sing
May be a common thing -
Or only a divine.”

Few of her contemporaries would have preferred a “common thing” to something they had identified as “divine”, but Dickinson was a lover of common things, whether Bobolinks or butterflies. The Baltimore Oriole’s song is purer, or more obviously melodic, than a Bobolink’s, but considerably less inventive or unpredictable. Perhaps it is “only” expressive of a rather solemn form of natural worship.

“It is not of the Bird
Who sings the same, unheard,
As unto Crowd -

The Fashion of the Ear
Attireth that it hear
In Dun, or fair

So whether it be Rune -
Or whether it be none
Is of within.

The “Tune is in the Tree -”
The Skeptic - showeth me -
“No Sir! In Thee!” ”

Assuming that R.W. Franklin is correct in the chronological arrangement of the poems, we can go some way toward reconstructing Dickinson’s train of thought in arriving at this one. Five poems earlier, she was writing about a bird singing at a funeral, who “trilled, and quivered, and shook his throat/ Till all the churchyard rang.” In this poem, she concludes that the bird sang “To say good bye to men”, but in the next, when birds are singing in chorus “The Morning after Wo”, she reaches the opposite conclusion: “Nature did not Care - / And piled her Blossoms on - / The further to parade a Joy / Her Victim stared opon –”. The birds’ voices are “Like Hammers”, and “they fell / Like Litanies of Lead -” The birds are still singing in the language of worship, but their notes are on the “Crucifixal Clef”, and in “some key of Calvary”.

Perhaps the funeral was that of Frazar Stearns, whose body was brought back to Amherst from the battlefield of New Bern in the spring of 1862, just when the Orioles would have been singing. The birds, of course, do not care. They would sing “the same, unheard”, and it is merely the emotional state of the human listener that determines whether the song is “common” or “divine”, “Dun” or “fair”, “Rune” or “none”.

*

Seventeen years later, Dickinson returned to the subject of the Oriole, but her focus had shifted to its plumage, its eating habits, and its migratory status.

“One of the ones that Midas touched
Who failed to touch us all
Was that confiding Prodigal
The reeling Oriole -

So drunk he disavows it
With badinage divine -
So dazzling we mistake him
For an alighting Mine -”

The golden feathers of the Oriole are a likely subject for a poet, and the reference to Midas a conventional one, but Dickinson mixes a Classical comparison with a Biblical one to suggest a closer natural observation. The bird is a “Prodigal”, “reeling” and “drunk”. During the last part of their stay in the eastern states, Orioles gorge themselves on orchard fruits. They prefer the darker-coloured, mature berries, grapes and cherries, and are particularly fond of mulberries, all of which become mildly alcoholic in the warmth of late summer – and mulberries can be psychoactive. The Oriole likes to stick its closed beak into the larger, softer fruits, open it wide to tweezer a gash in the skin, and then mop up the bleeding juice with its tongue. Perhaps this is why Dickinson reaches for that delicious oxymoron, “badinage divine”. “Badinage” is sometimes defined as witty or humorous conversation, but it also connotes the opposite of benediction, bad language and usury. The lines that follow are perhaps a little comically unfair on the Oriole, who is also an avid predator of the forest tent caterpillar moth, widely regarded as a pest species which strips deciduous trees of their leaves. Dickinson portrays him as greedily absconding with the fruits and fragrances of summer as he prepares to migrate south:

“A Pleader - a Dissembler -
An Epicure - a Thief -
Becomes an Oratorio -
An Ecstasy in chief -

The Jesuit of Orchards
He cheats as he enchants
Of an entire Attar
For his decamping wants –”

He is becoming a metaphor, of course, for the departure of summer itself, and simultaneously, Dickinson’s assonances make reference to his virtuoso singing, its magical qualities, and his reputation for thievery: “cheats… enchants”. She cheekily plays on the prejudices of her Puritan contemporaries, who saw Jesuits as dangerous, gluttonous deceivers, and also, perhaps, on a certain xenophobia that held the exotic in suspicion and astronomical phenomena in superstitious awe:

“The splendor of a Burmah
The Meteor of Birds,
Departing like a Pageant
Of Ballads and of Bards –”

Dickinson might be referring to Burma (Myanmar) itself, a byword in her time for colourful exoticism, but there is another, enticing possibility. Given her fascination with ocean voyages and shipwrecks, she may be comparing the bird to the passenger liner Burmah, which disappeared en-route from England to New Zealand in 1859-1860, probably sunk by an iceberg – sunk when, like the Oriole, it was flitting south. And it is time for Dickinson’s poem, too, to turn and flit from one mythological reference to another:

“I never thought that Jason sought
For any Golden Fleece
But then I am a rural Man
With thoughts that make for Peace –
And if there was a Jason,
Tradition bear with me
Behold his lost Aggrandizement
Opon the Apple Tree –”

Finally, we have Dickinson’s affirmation of the bird. The story of the Prodigal Son, the myths of Midas and of the Argonauts, are not to be believed, but the stunning, vivid reality of a Baltimore Oriole, perched in one’s own orchard in the last moments before taking flight for thousands of miles, perhaps makes it worth bearing the wanton pillage of those last fruits after all. Its riches are beyond price.

*

And the very next poem she wrote turns to the subject of Audobon’s favourite – that fourth migratory bird that shared her garden with the Robin, the Bobolink and the Oriole – a bird still more exotic, though less of a danger to the orchard:

“A Route of Evanescence,
With a revolving Wheel -
A Resonance of Emerald
A Rush of Cochineal -
And every Blossom on the Bush
Adjusts it’s tumbled Head -
The Mail from Tunis - probably,
An easy Morning’s Ride -”

The Ruby-Throated Hummingbird is the only one of the 338 known species of the family Trochilidae to visit the eastern portion of the United States, migrating to Mexico for the winter, negotiating the whole of the Gulf of Mexico on a single top-up of nectar and insects, after assiduously building up a layer of subcutaneous fat by feeding from blossoms throughout the summer months. The feathers on its back do indeed resonate with an emerald colour, not because they are pigmented, but because they are iridescent, reflecting light at particular frequencies, and the male’s gorget flashes a dazzling, metallic cochineal when viewed from particular angles. The average weight of a male is 3.4 grams. Dickinson’s hummingbird is hovering at a flower, keeping his body static in relation to the bloom as it waves in the breeze, flying backwards if necessary, picking insects from inside the corolla and drinking a gift of nectar, holding himself aloft at a rate of up to eighty whirring wing-beats per second. That is why his wings are almost invisible to the human eye, like the spokes of a “revolving Wheel”. Not much less than a third of his body weight is composed of flight muscles. He may not fly as far as Africa, as Dickinson proposes, but scientists were long confounded as to how his body could take on sufficient fuel to fly non-stop to Panama.

How appropriate that Dickinson should celebrate him in a form favoured by ancient bards – the riddle. It is a distilled version of one she wrote in 1862, in which the wheel metaphor is already at work, and she marvels at the fact that he “partakes without alighting / And praises as he goes”. She reflects that his “Fairy Gig” (she toys with the adjective “microscopic”) will soon be departing for “remoter atmospheres”. She and her beloved Newfoundland dog, Carlo, stand perplexed as the blossoms vibrate.

In the twenty-first century, the Ruby-Throated Hummingbird is still regarded with such awe that special plastic feeding stations have been invented for it to use, feeding it sugar solutions through artificial flowers. Its conservation status is “least concern” because unlike many of its relatives, its population is actually increasing. It has the advantage that it is perfectly natural to see its flight as a form of praise, its reflective colours as a pinnacle of nature’s creativity, and its very being as nothing short of miraculous.

*

But what of the Bobolink? How has it fared?
It retained its place in Dickinson’s affections, because she loved its swagger. In 1883, she laments that there is nothing left but sobriety now that “the Rowdy of the Meadow” has migrated and only the “Presbyterian Birds” remain, so that the only being likely to swagger about in the fields now is herself. That poem is preceded by a longer meditation on his migratory habits from 1874 – one which, in the context of the depleted biodiversity of our own age, invites a sadder reading.

“The Way to know the Bobolink
From every other Bird
Precisely as the Joy of him
Obliged to be inferred.

Of impudent Habilment
Attired to defy,
Impertinence subordinate
At times to Majesty –

Of Sentiments seditious
Amenable to Law –
As Heresies of Transport
Or Puck’s Apostacy –”

We cannot doubt that Dickinson is delighted by his heresies, his impertinence and his impudence. He is defiant in his joy. Although Dickinson has the habit of writing about her birds as individuals, in the singular, we should bear her mind that in her time, as Audobon confirms, Bobolinks often sang in chorus. He tells us in The Birds of America that “it becomes amusing to listen to thirty or forty of them beginning one after another, after the first notes are given by a leader, and producing such a medley as it is impossible to describe…” A tree full of Bobolinks did indeed seem like something that might have been orchestrated by Puck himself.

“Extrinsic to Attention
Too intimate with Joy –
He compliments Existence
Until allured away

By Seasons or his Children –
Adult and urgent grown –
Or unforeseen Aggrandizement
Or, happily, Renown –

By Contrast certifying
The Bird of Birds is gone –
How nullified the Meadow –
Her Sorcerer withdrawn!”

Fast forward to the present day, and Bobolinks are showing signs of being in trouble. The “Sorcerer” has “withdrawn” for all the wrong reasons. The meadow is “nullified” not because the Bobolink has followed his fledgelings back to Argentina, but because the species is regionally in decline. In 2009, the Bobolink population that spends summer in Vermont had plummeted in numbers by 75 percent since the 1960s, with a projected further decline of 3.1 percent per year. Bobolinks are not yet an endangered species, because their decline is geographically uneven, but in New England, during the later twentieth century, the meadows began to fall silent. The birds nest on the ground in agricultural fields, and as with the Corncrake in northern Europe, changes in the time of harvest mean that the young are now often cut to pieces before they are fledged.

But there is cause for some optimism. Associate Professor Allan Strong of The University of Vermont, wondering whether “people are willing to pay for certain goods and services that are essentially provided for free – from nature”, has implemented The Bobolink Project, which organises for people who love Bobolinks to pay farmers to delay the harvest until the nests are empty. The divine is in short supply in the twenty-first century. If a bird can lead us to it, we might feel motivated to conserve it. Perhaps, at last, with the Bobolink in New England reduced to a forlorn shadow of its former population, the rest of humanity is catching up with Emily Dickinson, who only had to hear its song to touch the divine and grow imaginary wings.

Piles of Solid Moan

A contemporary engraving of the Battle of New Bern (March 14th, 1862), printed by Currier and Ives of New York, shows the Union troops on the verge of victory, but still not out of danger. Their blue uniforms are the only bright colour in the picture, echoed only in the thin wash which denotes the mouth of the River Neuse with the distant town beyond it. Most carry bayonets, and are running forward down the hill towards the estuary, goaded on by two officers, one mounted, one on foot, wielding their swords to skyward. A third officer’s horse is rearing, terrified as an explosion rends the earth beside it, and soldiers lurch about – one shielding his eyes from the searing light, one prostrate, reaching for his knee, one flying spreadeagled with his hand on his head, another clutching helplessly at the shrapnel hole in his chest. Other Union soldiers lie bleeding and dying, their gazes fixed in every direction. Their faces are carefully depicted – they might well have been identifiable to their loved ones. A thin stream of blood emerges from the bullet-hole in one man’s chest, joining with the bottom margin of the picture. He stares at the sky. Beneath these flailing, dying victors, lie the Confederate dead in their dun uniforms, jaws thrust towards heaven. A swarm of Union soldiers courses down the hill – a bristling sea of bayonets stretching to the horizon.

One of those mortally wounded Union soldiers might have been Frazar Augustus Stearns, of Amherst, who was killed that day, shot with a rifle as he rallied the troops for the charge. It took him two and a half hours to die from loss of blood. His body came back to Amherst with a Confederate cannon he had helped to capture. Among his mourners was Austin Dickinson, Frazar Stearns’s close friend, and Austin’s sister, Emily. “Austin is chilled – by Frazer’s murder –” she wrote, “He says – his Brain keeps saying over ‘Frazer is killed’ – ‘Frazer is killed’… Two or three words of lead – that dropped so deep, they keep weighing -” Frazar’s companions in his last hours were careful to testify as to his demeanour during those one hundred and fifty last minutes. His commanding officer, Colonel William Smith Clark, wrote that he “died without a struggle”.

*

The nineteenth century American craft of dying insisted that it was very important to die without a struggle – to die calmly, reconciled with one’s fate, eagerly anticipating one’s heavenly reward. Emily Dickinson’s own fascination with the moments before death, which often took a macabre direction of its own, doubtless grew out of this concern with the importance of dying a good death, but she found it difficult to stop there. She certainly wanted to know whether Frazar Stearns really did die “without a struggle”:

“To know just how He suffered – would be dear –
To know if any Human eyes were near
To whom He could entrust his wavering gaze –
Until it settled broad – on Paradise –

To know if He was patient – part content –
Was Dying as He thought – or different –
Was it a pleasant Day to die –
And did the Sunshine face His way –

What was His furthest mind – of Home – or God –
Or What the Distant say –
At News that He ceased Human Nature
Such a Day –”

As in the engraving, so in the poem: the gaze of the dying soldier is the first thing to be noticed – but Stearns did not die immediately, and Dickinson wants to know, were there living human eyes to catch his dying gaze – to bridge that gulf of separation one last time as he wavered between this world and the next? She has begun to set up a series of opposites which will toll solemnly throughout the poem. She wants to know if there were “Human eyes… near”, but also to know “What was his furthest mind” – whether it was focused on nearness or on distance, on “Home – or God”. At times, she dips into the conventional well of sentiment, with its references to “Paradise” and “Sunshine”, but she may be reaching into the much deeper pit of existential dread when she apprehends the fact that Stearns’s death means that he has “ceased Human Nature” and become something distant, foreign, unreachable – other. Another word is repeating itself, and reinforcing itself with rhyme. It is “Day” – the Day of death, the Day of divine wrath or mercy, the Day of the Lord from the Book of Revelation.

“And Wishes – Had He any –
Just His Sigh – accented –
Had been legible – to Me –
And was He Confident until
Ill fluttered out – in Everlasting Well –”

That question of nearness or distance is tolling, too. As his destiny was fixed ever more firmly on the eternal with each gush of haemorrhaging blood, did he have any last earthly wishes? Would anything have alleviated the pain? Had those attending him made sure that his arm was not twisted uncomfortably under him, that he was not thirsty, that he was not hot, or cold? He would not have had to put it into words. I would have been able to read it, Dickinson insists, just from the accent of his sigh. But these are only things of fleeting importance. He is now “ill”, but will soon be “Well”, everlastingly, if the theology of Dickinson’s community is to be believed.

This is where the form of the poem breaks down, and perhaps Dickinson does, too. Perhaps I should take that statement out of the passive voice and write it again: Dickinson systematically smashes up the form of her own poem. Her hesitation over word-choices, denoted by her plus signs, becomes apocalyptic, the tolling of opposites resounding on “last” and “first”, Alpha and Omega:

“And if He spoke – What name was Best –
What + last +first
What one broke off with
At the Drowsiest –

Was he afraid – or tranquil –
Might he know
How Conscious Consciousness – could grow –
Till Love that was – and Love too best to be –
Meet and the Junction +be Eternity +mean”

But it is also tolling on those lingering human concerns about Stearns’s dying emotions – whether of fear or tranquility – and of how his sense of his immediate needs, in those last minutes as blood-loss made him drowsy, interrupted his progress towards “Eternity”: the shutting down of the consciousness of this world as he became conscious of the next.

And what if he was afraid? What if Colonel Clark was merely offering platitudes when he insisted that Frazar Stearns died “without a struggle”? Dickinson doesn’t seem to be sure.

*

‘To know just how He suffered’ may not have been Dickinson’s first elegy for Frazar Stearns. R.W. Franklin has dated ‘Victory comes late’ to 1861, but the poem, written in an anguished free-verse form, seems also to explore the bitter irony of death in a victorious battle, the dying lips growing cold before they can taste the triumph:

"Victory comes late –
And is held low to freezing lips
Too rapt with frost
To take it –
How sweet it would have tasted –
Just a Drop –
Was God so economical?"

Her agnosticism is rarely entirely hidden, but here it erupts into bitter sarcasm. God is too miserly to even grant a “Drop” of the heady liquor of victory to this dying soldier. In ‘A Bird came down the Walk’, Dickinson allows her bird to drink “a Dew / From a convenient Grass’ and even offers “him a Crumb”, but God disdains to do this for Frazar Stearns.

"His Table’s spread too high for Us
Unless We dine on Tiptoe –
Crumbs – fit such little mouths –
Cherries – suit Robins –
The Eagle’s Golden Breakfast strangles – Them –
God keep His Oath to Sparrows –
Who of little Love – know how to starve –"

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus promised that his Father, who cares for the birds of the air, would care much more for his people. Hamlet, too, remarked that “There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow”. Birds have their own natural eucharists of crumbs and dew and cherries – in Dickinson’s garden perhaps – but sometimes, God lets them starve. Sometimes, eagles have them for breakfast. And he starved Frazar Stearns of the taste of victory, by bringing it on just a little too late, even as he fought under the sign of the Union’s Bald Eagle. Instead, as Dickinson wrote later in 1862, he must enter “The Forest of the Dead” and surrender, waving “Eternity’s White Flag”, facing the terrifying, remorseless inevitability of “God – at every Gate -”

*
And then there are those who stay at home, to become helpless witnesses to the remorselessness of Providence. When her uncle Loring Norcross died in 1863, Dickinson sent a poem to her cousins, Louise and Frances, which, whilst it is ostensibly about those who remain behind when others die of natural causes, seems likely to also be obliquely referring to the Civil War.

“ ‘Tis not that Dying hurts us so –
‘Tis Living – hurts us more –
But Dying – is a different way –
A kind behind the Door –

The Southern Custom – of the Bird –
That ere the Frosts are due –
Accepts a better Latitude –
We – are the Birds – that stay.”

Dickinson is thinking of her Robins and other migratory birds again – they go south, and Loring Norcross and Frazar Stearns have migrated into death – but we are the ones who must endure the pain of residence. And how can anyone have read that phrase, “Southern Custom”, in 1863, and not have thought of war, and how it tore communities apart?

“The Shiverers round Farmer’s doors –
For whose reluctant Crumb –
We stipulate – till pitying Snows
Persuade our Feathers Home”

To “stipulate” is to make a contract, or to settle terms. We settle, grudgingly, for our “Crumb” of security. Some birds will return, and some will not. There is nothing we can do but wait. It is an impoverished sacrament indeed.

*

In one other extraordinary poem from 1862, Dickinson wrote in the voice of a defeated soldier, surveying the battlefield in a state of shocked detachment. He admits that he would prefer to face the musket balls themselves than endure this empty silence:

"My Portion is Defeat – today –
A paler luck than Victory –
Less Paens – fewer Bells –
The Drums don’t follow Me – with tunes –
Defeat – a somewhat slower – means –
More +Arduous than Balls - +something dumber"

Suddenly, it is as though Currier and Ives’s engraving comes to life in Dickinson’s imagination. She sees the battlefield through the soldier’s eyes, and describes it in words stripped entirely of sentiment:

" ‘Tis populous with Bone and stain –
And Men too straight to +stoop again - +bend
And Piles of solid Moan –
And Chips of Blank – in Boyish Eyes –
And +scraps of Prayer - +shreds
And Death’s surprise,
Stamped visible – in stone –"

Currier and Ives left out the splintered bones and spilt brains, but they are here. So is the rigor-mortis, and the laying-out for mass burial – and before it, in a phrase in which Dickinson’s characteristic stylistic economy uncannily seems to anticipate Owen and Sassoon, those layers of broken and dying men, lumped into “Piles of solid Moan”. Their lives, prayers and bodies are reduced to “chips”, “shreds” and “scraps” – crumbs, morsels for birds. Perhaps our narrator is one of these piled-up, dying men. If so, he can see across to where the victorious forces are sounding their trumpets, although a great many of them, too, are dying:

“There’s something prouder, Over there -
The Trumpets tell it to the Air –
How different Victory
To Him who has it – and the One
Who to have had it, would have been
Contenteder – to die –”

*

Could there have been a measure of “contentedness” or “peace” in the death by loss of blood of Frazar Stearns on the battlefield of New Bern? Beyond Dickinson’s anger with a God she was not sure even existed, beyond her seemingly desperate attempt to make his death fit into the conventions of the ars moriendi of her time – and then her decision to smash this notion along with the carefully-constructed poetic form of ‘To know just how He suffered’ in its final stanzas – was there solace to be found in these elegies for the ruptured flesh of a man who had scarcely come of age? Could a dying Confederate soldier, looking out across the desolation and carnage at New Bern at the broken body of Frazar Stearns, really have cause to feel some sort of envy for the fact that his death was at least a victorious one?

It is perhaps easier to answer some of these questions from the vantage-point of history than it was for Emily Dickinson, because the results of that victory are known to us. Before the fall of New Bern, its African American population was 5,400. Of these, 4,700 were slaves. After the Union victory, there was a mass exodus of white oppressors from the town, and the region became a safe haven for thousands of African American refugees and escaped slaves, fleeing from Confederate hegemony, so much so that it became known as the “Mecca of Freedom”. Military victories are often as awful for the victors on the battlefield as they are for the vanquished, but sometimes there is also a moral victory, even if it “comes late”. Dickinson’s poems in response to the death of Frazar Stearns show us a woman who is justly angry with those with the power – whether God or politicians – who could not find another way of achieving this moral victory that did not involve ripping apart young men’s bodies.

Or, we could put it another way. Frazar Stearns died because the Confederates did not wish to be prevented from keeping slaves. There were persons more tangible than God whom Emily Dickinson could blame for the obscenity of his death.