Musings

Break—Life—Love—Line

Dear Emily,

Marguerite Stewart, one of my teachers, introduced me to you around 1976. A few years later, I was given the Thomas Johnson 1979 edition of your poems, published by Belknap Press at Harvard University. You’ve become quite an important industry! Everyone knows your name. You are considered one of the greatest American poets.

The most pressing question I have at the moment concerns your line breaks. Since I don’t have access to your handwritten pages, I have to depend on the publishers of your poems. In my Johnson edition, the first stanza of this poem is presented like this:

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading—treading—till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through—

At the Dickinson Electronic Archives, which claims to be publishing your poem exactly as you handwrote it, the first stanza is presented like this:

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading—treading—till
it seemed
That Sense was breaking through—

The pattern of breaking the line after “till” is repeated in the next stanza:

And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum—
Kept beating—beating—till
I thought
My Mind was going numb—

Should the third line break after “till” or not? Was the piece of paper you wrote on too narrow to finish the line? Were you not concerned about line breaks? A poet, Rose Kelleher, noticed that “it seemed” does not have an initial cap, so perhaps you did not mean to break the line. Perhaps you’d be surprised by all this anxious concern about your line breaks. A poet, T.S. Eliot, said that “No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written…”  I can assure you, Emily, that every tiny detail of your life and work is of great value to many people.

Apparently, your contemporary, Walt Whitman, was able to summon the resources to self-publish his poems. By doing so, he was able to protect authoritative versions of them. I can’t help wishing that you had found a way to protect an authoritative version of your poems, perhaps by typesetting them. Instead, we have handwritten poems in different versions: handwritten poems, bound in packets; handwritten poems, sent through the mail; handwritten poems, altered by everyone who reproduced them.

I don’t mean to sound ungrateful. I’m glad you wrote so many poems, and that they were miraculously saved. It’s just that I’d like to know you as you truly are, apart from everyone else’s ideas of you. I believe you did want to publish your poems, but since the few that were published were mangled beyond recognition, you decided to bind your pages privately and keep most of them hidden. Perhaps you didn’t know about self-publishing. Or the idea that a woman could self-publish was too outrageous in your day. Perhaps you knew that the battle to publish your poems just as you wanted them would take too much of your energy, and you wanted to save your energy for writing the poems.

I’ve studied reproductions of some of your handwritten pages. Johnson writes, “The final style [of handwriting] seems to have resulted from the trend toward ‘book’ writing...” Indeed, the handwriting looks like an imitation of typewriting. Did your handwriting change with book-longing in mind?

Of course, life makes it impossible to protect everything, or almost anything, really. I’m sorry to tell you that Mabel destroyed certain passages in your letters to and about Susan. You shouldn’t feel that it’s any kind of scandal that, just as we wonder about your line breaks, we wonder about your love life. The most “authoritative” scholars of your poems (Johnson, Franklin) deny or downplay your relationships with women. The feminist scholars are fascinated by your relationships with women. But you’re gone, and we will never absolutely know where you wanted to break your lines or spend your nights.

You wrote: “I'm ceded—I've stopped being theirs.” And it is not my position to assert authority over anyone’s love life. But I can’t help wondering, too, Emily, and wanting to know, protect, and defend you. In Lillian Faderman’s Chloe Plus Olivia: An Anthology of Lesbian Literature from the Seventeenth Century to the Present, I read this excerpt of an 1854 letter from you to Susan:

I do not miss you Susie—of course I do not miss you—I only sit and stare at nothing from my window, and know that all is gone. Dont feel it–no–any more than the stone feels, that it is very cold, or the block, that it is silent, where once ’twas warm and green, and birds danced in it's branches.

I rise, because the sun shines, and sleep has done with me, and I brush my hair, and dress me, and wonder what I am and who has made me so, and then I wash the dishes, and anon, wash them again, and then ’tis afternoon, and Ladies call, and evening, and some members of another sex come in to spend the hour, and then that day is done. And, prithee, what is Life?

I love women, I know this language, and it’s hard for me to read this as anything other than a love letter from one woman to another. So it is with mixed emotions–with frustration and apologies–that I decided to reinforce my point of view on your love life, by “translating” your letter into a sonnet.

No More

I do not miss you, Susie—no—I do
not miss you. All is gone—I only sit
and stare at nothing from my window—you
are gone—I know—yet I don’t feel a bit—
no more than stone can feel the cold—or block
can hear its silence—that it once was warm
and green and birds danced in its branches—rock
is hard to move—cut wood takes any form.

Because sun shines, and sleep has done with me,
I rise, and brush my hair, and dress me—then
I wonder what I am, and how to be,
and who has made me so. It’s time again
to wash the dishes—then it’s afternoons—
then evenings come, with waxing, waning moons.

Why a sonnet? Sonnets are particularly associated with love poetry. I chose the Shakespearean sonnet, because I have the most experience with this form of sonnet. Perhaps in the back of my mind, I remembered that Shakespeare’s sonnets, more than the plays, reveal the heart of the poet. “In fact there can be no doubt to any open-minded and sensitive reader that the sonnets are deadly personal, and reveal the quick of the poet's heart and life situation.”

When I showed this sonnet to a poet, Lee Harlin Bahan, she asked why I hadn’t used your characteristic “hymn meter” or included “the men coming to visit.” In response, I wrote this:

I could not Hope—to reach the Heights
Of Emily’s hymnal Home—
Meant more for—Public appetites
Than Letter—never shown—

Except to—Susie—in bridal Songs
Unsung—by any choir
Untouched by any Public wrongs—
Fire-scorched and shy

The Members of—another Sex
Excluded from this Place—
For once—dreamt—her female Nexus
Whole and—undisgraced

In your day, I imagine most Americans went to church and sang hymns. So hymn meter was perhaps your way of bringing the strange flower of yourself into the public realm. As if creating a hybrid, you breathed life into a traditional form. Perhaps your poems are too alive to be fixed and held stationary in a book.

I’ve read most of your poems, but not all. I’ve read some poems many times. Now, thirty years after we were first introduced, lines float into my mind while I’m doing the dishes—Beauty crowds me till I Die... wrecked  solitary here…—and at first I’m not sure who wrote these words, me or you.   

Yours truly,
Mary Meriam
March 12, 2007