672.1863.Take your Heaven further on-

Take your Heaven further on —
This — to Heaven divine Has gone —
Had You earlier blundered in
Possibly, e’en You had seen
An Eternity — put on —
Now — to ring a Door beyond
Is the utmost of Your Hand —
To the Skies — apologize —
Nearer to Your Courtesies
Than this Sufferer polite —
Dressed to meet You —
See — in White!

ED had reached the anger stage of grief recovery, and she aimed her darts at Wadsworth, yet she still loved him. As evidence of her enduring love for Wadsworth and his for her, here is an 1879 “Calvary” poem (F1485) that affirmed her concern for Wadsworth in a sweet quatrain, ‘Spurn the temerity —’:

“Spurn the temerity —
Rashness of Calvary —
Gay were Gethsemane
Knew we of Thee —

It would not surprise me if she mailed F1485 to Wadsworth in 1879, though we have no hard evidence that happened. At any rate, the following summer, 1880, he showed up unannounced at her front door:

“Where did you come from,” I said, for he spoke like an Apparition.

“I stepped from my Pulpit to the Train” was [his] simple reply, and when I asked “how long,” “Twenty Years” said he with inscrutable roguery – but the loved Voice has ceased.”
(Letter 1040 to Charles Clark, April 15, 1886, exactly one month before she died)

The ED-Wadsworth “love affair” was likely a marriage of two disparate minds who agreed to disagree, both deeply spiritual, one an eloquent conservative Christian minister, the other a world-class agnostic poet. They died good friends, in 1882 and 1886 respectively.

PS1, Apparently, “Calvary” and “Gethsemane” are ED’s code names for Wadsworth and herself. She had to be careful in her poems to protect Wadsworth’s reputation and her privacy. ‘Spurn the temerity —’ (F1485, 1879) is the 12th and last of her “Calvary” poems.

PS2, Wadsworth, who was 66 in 1880 and nearing the end of his life, apparently made the 500-mile roundtrip from his home in Philadelphia to visit friends James and Charles Clark in Northampton and deliver a sermon at their church. He must have made the 12-mile train trip to Amherst that afternoon to visit ED. “Twenty Years” was a his roguish reference to his previous visit with her in Amherst in summer 1860.

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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.