813.1864.How well I knew Her not

How well I knew Her not
Whom not to know has been
A Bounty in prospective, now
Next Door to mine the Pain.

Miller (1924) tells us ED sent this poem to Maria Whitney, about February 11, 1864. Austin visited Whitney in Northampton on February 11 before she sailed for California on the 13^th to look after the six children of her sister, Elizabeth Whitney Putnam, who died June 1863 in San Francisco.

I think the personal level of Fr813 runs deep, especially enjambed Lines 3 & 4: “now / Next Door to mine the Pain”. In her own way, ED empathizes with Maria’s loss of a sister because she has also lost a sister. In fact, ED’s “dead sister” lives “Next Door”, which daily “mine[s] the Pain”.

In March 1853 Susan and Austin became engaged after a tryst at the Revere Hotel in Boston. For obvious reasons, Sue had to cool her relationship with Emily, and on April 1, 1854, ED responded sharply to Sue (L172): “You can go or stay”.

In late 1858, perhaps as a birthday greeting on Sue’s birthday, 19 December, ED tried to mend bridges with ‘One Sister have I’ (Fr5, 1858), but the rift never healed.

“One Sister have I in our house,
And one, a hedge away.
There’s only one recorded,
But both belong to me.

One came the road that I came —
And wore my last year’s gown —
The other, as a bird her nest,
Builded our hearts among.

She did not sing as we did —
It was a different tune —
Herself to her a music
As Bumble bee of June.

Today is far from Childhood —
But up and down the hills
I held her hand the tighter —
Which shortened all the miles —

And still her hum
The years among,
Deceives the Butterfly;
Still in her Eye
The Violets lie
Mouldered this many May.

I spilt the dew —
But took the morn —
I chose this single star
From out the wide night’s numbers —
Sue – forevermore!

Those last two stanzas are among the most poignant ED ever wrote. She “spilt the dew” and has been ruing it for 10 years (1854-1864).

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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.