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.