812.1864.Love reckons by itself—alone—

Love reckons by itself—alone
“As large as I”—relate the Sun
To One who never felt it blaze—
Itself is all the like it has—

I feel the aloneness of the speaker. The poem is I-oriented, not we-oriented. Knowing ED’s preference for isolation in her bedroom and her inclination for self-absorption, Lines 3 and 4 seem pseudo-wise words based on limited personal experience.

This poem tracks with a few other poems in Fascicle 35 in which Dickinson wonders why an unnamed friend is withholding their smile.” Both her premier biographer, Sewall (1974), and an insightful Ph.D. student, Murray (1988), commented on ED feeling rejected:

Sewall (1974), ED’s premier biographer, put it bluntly:

“[ED’s] failures, certainly, were with people. Throughout her life, she never achieved a single, wholly satisfying relationship with anybody she had to be near, or with, for any length of time. Vinnie was the closest, perhaps; but even she spoke of her family as living together like “friendly and absolute monarchs” (Higginson, we recall, likened them to federated states in a commonwealth, where “each member runs his or her own selves”). . . . .

“All her life she demanded too much of people. Her early girl friends could hardly keep up with her tumultuous letters or, like Sue, could not or would not take her into their lives as she wanted to be taken. They had other concerns. The young men, save for a few who had amusing or edifying intellectual exchanges with her, apparently shied away. Eliza Coleman’s fear that her friends in Amherst “wholly misinterpret” her, was a polite way of saying, perhaps, that they would not respond with the intensity she apparently demanded of everyone. She seemed unable to take friendship casually, nor could she be realistic about love. The result was excessive tension at every meeting, so that meetings themselves became ordeals. One such meeting was enough for Higginson (“I am glad not to live near her”); in her own economy, she found that she had to ration them very carefully. And when she fell in love, all this was further intensified. The one meeting recorded in this letter, when she asked her Master for Redemption, spelled at once her joy and her tragedy. It exalted her-she bloomed like the rose, she soared like the bird-but it plunged her into “Chillon,” the captive of her own soaring fantasy about love.”

Similarly, Murray (1988) observes, “Dickinson established a traceable pattern of behavior in her girlhood friendships that she continued into the relationships of her adult life. When she discovered a person who potentially shared her feelings about a certain subject, she responded with surprise, enthusiasm, and selfishness. . . . In Dickinson’s pattern, after initial discovery, the friendship would blossom and grow, fueled by a great profusion of letters sharing confidences, feelings, and ideas. In these letters, she engaged her fertile imagination, savoring the kinship that she perceived between her and the kindred spirit she believed she had found.

“The friend, at some point following the relationship’s blossoming, realized that he or she could not reciprocate with the same ardor, frequency, or depth of feeling as Emily, to meet the poet’s intense emotional, spiritual, or intellectual needs. The friend then usually withdrew, withholding contact from her. Dickinson, then perceiving the slackening on the friend’s part, sought in letters to renew the friendship through chiding and wheedling. When these attempts failed to secure the desired results, she decided that the slowing of the friendship had occurred because of the friend’s disloyalty and betrayal, and she cooled in her once-passionate feelings for the friend. In most cases, correspondence stopped. And she opened once again the lid to what she called her “box of Phantoms” and put away another friend.” (Murray 1988).

ED coined her phrase, “Box of Phantoms”, in two letters, ML181 (JL177) and ML189 (JL186)

Sewall, Richard B. 1974. ‘The Life of Emily Dickinson’. 2 vols. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. [Also, ‘The Life of Emily Dickinson’, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, Kindle edition, pp 517-518]
Murray, Barbara M. 1988. The scarlet experiment: Emily Dickinson’s abortion experience. Ph.D. dissertation. University of Tennessee. 391 pages. (https://www.proquest.com/openview/0eecb3a583e119ca3a94cde080a874d1/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y)
Miller, C and Mitchell, D. 2024. The Letters of Emily Dickinson. Harvard University Press. Kindle Edition.

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After commenting on Poems 1-763 (Franklin) on The Prowling Bee’, I am convinced that (virtually) all of Emily Dickinson’s (ED’s) poems have a factual historical level in addition to their various poetic levels of meaning. The reason for her instant and continuing public adulation (1890 - present) was and is, by far, poetic. She is one of the "Greats" that she always dreamed to be, despite her lifelong refusal to publish. That refusal freed her from criticism and allowed her to explore the outer boundaries of poetic power.

More than a century of scholarly research has resulted in somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 books and published academic papers about ED. A large majority of these publications focus only on the “poetic levels” of one or more of ED’s poems. Publications that consider both the “historic level” and “poetic levels” comprise a small minority. Publications that focus only on the factual history of her life probably number less than 100. (All numbers in this paragraph are my estimates.)

Unfortunately for ED’s universe of readers, these two basic levels (historical and poetic) cannot be separated into two ivory towers. Every history-level publication that I know of includes at least some discussion of the poetic level(s).

The reverse is not true. In fact, authors of the “poetry-level” school seem to avoid commenting on the historical level, sometimes admonishing that a poem must stand on its own, without concern for its historical roots. To my knowledge, there are (virtually) no published “history-level” books or articles that totally ignore ED’s poems and their poetic levels.

Of course, ED’s refusal to publish her poems was only possible because of lifelong financial and daily social/housekeeping support by her family, especially her father and sister, respectively. In addition, throughout her life, the Dickinsons hired servants, first Negro and later Irish, some of whom became much more than housekeepers for ED.

My point is that our appreciation of ED's poems can be enhanced by understanding both poetic and historical levels of her sound and sense. We impoverish ourselves if we ignore their historical base.