Since her death in 1886, Emily Dickinson has haunted us in many forms.
As the world continues to endure the ravages of COVID-19, another ghost of Dickinson steps into view. This one, about 40 years old, seems by turns vulnerable and formidable, reclusive and forward. She carries the dead weight of crises beyond her control, but remains unbowed by it.
The Depths of Loss
Most admirers of Dickinson’s poetry know that she spent a considerable part of her adult life in what we call self-imposed confinement, rarely venturing outside the family homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts. Less known, perhaps, is that the final 12 years of her life were passed in a state of nearly perpetual mourning.Piling On
What impact did so much grief have on the mind of one of America’s greatest visionary artists? Her letters say little enough. Writing to Mrs. Samuel Mack in 1884, however, she frankly admits: “The Dyings have been too deep for me, and before I could raise my heart from one, another has come.”The word “deep” is an arresting choice, making it sound as though Dickinson is drowning in a pile of dead loved ones. Each time she comes up for air, yet another body is added to the great mass.
The price is great - Sublimely paid - Do we deserve - a Thing - That lives - like Dollars - must be piled Before we may obtain?
In describing her more personal losses of the 1870s, Dickinson seems to imagine yet another pile of human corpses rising before her eyes. Or maybe it is the same pile, her loved ones added to the dead troops whose fate she kept contemplating to the end of her own life. Seen in this light, the “Dyings” appear not just too deep but unfathomably so.Life After Death
At the time of this reprinting, the pile of lives that overshadows our lives is 18,00,000 deep and getting deeper by the hour. Dickinson’s imagery shows how keenly she would have understood what we might feel, dwarfed by a mountain of mortality that will not stop growing. The same anger, exhaustion, and sense of futility were her constant companions in later life.I never hear that one is dead Without the chance of Life Afresh annihilating me That mightiest Belief,
Too mighty for the Daily mind That tilling it’s abyss, Had Madness, had it once or, Twice The yawning Consciousness,
Beliefs are Bandaged, like the Tongue When Terror were it told In any Tone commensurate Would strike us instant Dead -
I do not know the man so bold He dare in lonely Place That awful stranger - Consciousness Deliberately face -
These words resonate in the current crisis, during which protecting the “daily mind” has become a full-time job. News reports, with their updated death tolls, erode our intellectual and spiritual foundations. All seems lost.But if strain and sorrow are palpable in this poem, so is courage. Dickinson’s lonely speaker chooses to express what she has felt, to measure and record the burden of loss that life has thrust upon her. Beliefs, once bandaged, may heal. And while no man has ever been bold enough to confront the deeper “Consciousness” that so many deaths expose within the human mind, the speaker will not rule out doing so herself. There is still room in this blighted world for the kind of visionary experience from which hope not only springs, but flourishes.
Living in the shadow of death, Dickinson remained enamored of life. This, as much as anything, makes her a hero of our time.