Sunday 
10 December 2017

— After another hour’s worth of searching for my extra set of (wretched) car keys.

Good Morning All,

Emily Dickinson was born on this day in 1830 into a prominent family in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her ancestors had arrived 200 years earlier in the Puritan Great Migration. Her father was a lawyer and trustee of Amherst College, who married Emily Norcross from Monson, MA, the next town over from Wales, where our cottage is.

She wrote nearly 1,800 poems, though fewer than a dozen found their way into print, most of those altered by editors trying to make them look more conventional. She exacted a promise from her sister Lavinia to burn all her papers upon her death. Happily, Lavinia, coming upon the poems, many of them on scraps of paper in the backs of bureau drawers, broke her promise.

Many of her poems address the themes of death and immortality. She was clearly a Thanatiphobe, and with some cause, since family members and friends had a way of dropping dead around her. I’ve often wondered if that was not a reason for her entering into seclusion and becoming a recluse in her mid-thirties and until her own death in 1886 at the age of 56.

Though in her later years she rarely left the Dickinson house, the Homestead, where she did chores and all the baking, she maintained a wide correspondence with friends and—possibly—a scripted romantic relationship or two. She sometimes had picnics with neighborhood children, she lowering a basket of food from her bedroom window, and remaining at her window talking to them during the meal.

During my high school years, when good old Miss Krastin (who herself lived alone in a gothic house with 28 cats) introduced me to Emily, I had an instant literary crush on her, and above and beyond that felt that she must be related to me in some way. A fourth cousin thrice removed, maybe, for she so often spoke my exact thoughts … well, let me rephrase that: she so often spoke the pure and rarified versions of my jumbled thoughts and did so with such brilliant and succinct language.

Four brief Emily quotes:

1. The soul should always stand ajar.

2. I hope you love birds, too. It is economical. It saves going to heaven.

3. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

4. Tell the truth, but tell it slant.

As usual, I’ve reached my unofficial word limit too soon, but I’ll just mention once more that when Britta and the kids and I went to visit her house in Amherst, I was able to walk the grounds okay, but was unable to enter into her house and privacy. The experience was like an actual magnetic force as I went up the front steps, like when you try to put the black and white Scotty dogs together, but have the two positives (or two negatives) facing each other, such that one of the dogs spins around.

My favorite Emily poem is a toss up between the one in today’s Day Book and the one below. 

A Bird Came Down
Emily Dickinson

A bird came down the walk --

He did not know I saw -- 
He bit an angle-worm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw,

And then he drank a dew
From a convenient grass --
And then hopped sidewise to the wall
To let a beetle pass --

He glanced with rapid eyes
That hurried all abroad -- 
They looked like frightened beads, I thought; 
He stirred his velvet head --

Like one in danger; cautious,
I offered him a crumb,
And he unrolled his feathers
And rowed him softer home 

Than Oars divide the Ocean,
Too silver for a seam,
Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon,
Leap, splashless, as they swim. 

Go Well and Stay Well,

Bhekaron 

P.S. Emily was a redhead, by the way.

P.P.S. One shot of Emily (left) brother Austin, and sister Lavinia; one Holly snap: