Emily Dickinson's smoking poems

Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, The, March-April, 2004 by Wendy Fenwick

Emily Dickinson is the perennially inscrutable 20th-century poet who lived in the 19th century, a woman whose poetry was as radical and eccentric as her personal life was cramped and ordinary. Her two nicknames--"the belle of Amherst" and "the nun of Amherst"--encapsulate the profound ambiguity of her personality: on the one hand a woman of obvious sensuality with an almost unrestrained capacity for love and joy, on the other a retiring spinster who withdrew from the human community to become a kind of writing monk. One thinks of that other 19th-century "modern" poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Jesuit priest who wrote poems that rise and crest like verbal orgasms, poems he would then proceed to burn in a fit of Catholic remorse.

Dickinson didn't burn her poems but tended to stash them away in drawers. Many were included in letters that she sent to friends and relatives. Of the 1,800 or so poems that we have, more than half were sent to women, many to her sister-in-law Susan Gilbert Dickinson. Modern readers have no trouble seeing these poems as those of a woman in love and probably in lust, but critics have traditionally written them off as characteristically florid declarations of 19th-century "romantic friendship." The trouble here is that Dickinson's writing is so original and self-conscious in every other respect, why would her declarations of love and longing for another woman be merely conventional?

Somehow the question of whether Dickinson "acted upon" these feelings has always seemed a bit impertinent, even vulgar, especially in light of the white-clad, virginal image that she seems to have tried so hard to project. But the letters and poems belie, at the very least, a fantasy life that was filled with acts of kissing and touching another woman.

If there's a "smoking gun" in Dickinson's writings, its plainest expression is in the prose letters she wrote to Susan, which were explored in this journal a while back (See Marietta Messmer, Sept.-Oct. 2001 issue). Her poetry is famously slippery and abstract, her meaning rarely so literal as to involve a direct encounter with the physical world. Nevertheless, a number of the poems have been seen to convey a strong element of same-sex desire, of which some of the most commonly cited appear below. Let the reader decide.

               84
  Her breast is fit for pearls,
  But I was not a "Diver"--
  Her brow is fit for thrones
  But I have not a crest.
  Her heart is fit for home--
  I--a Sparrow--build there
  Sweet of twigs and twine
  My perennial nest.

             249
  Wild Nights--Wild Nights!
  Were I with thee
  Wild Nights should be
  Our luxury!
  Futile--the Winds--
  To a Heart in port--
  Done with the Compass--
  Done with the Chart!

  Rowing in Eden--
  Ah, the Sea!
  Might I but moor--Tonight--
  In Thee!

                 518
  Her sweet Weight on my Heart a Night
  Had scarcely deigned to lie--
  When, stirring, for Belief's delight,
  My Bride had slipped away--

  If 'twas a Dream--made solid--just
  The Heaven to confirm--
  Or if Myself were dreamed of Her--
  The power to presume--

  With Him remain--who unto Me--
  Gave--even as to All--
  A Fiction superseding Faith--
  By so much--as 'twas real--

               1219
  Now I knew I lost her--
  Not that she was gone--
  But Remoteness travelled
  On her Face and Tongue.
  Alien, though adjoining
  As a Foreign Race--
  Traversed she though pausing
  Latitudeless Place

  Elements Unaltered--
  Universe the same
  But Love's transmigration--
  Somehow this had come--

  Henceforth to remember
  Nature took the Day
  I had paid so much for--
  His is Penury
  Not who toils for Freedom
  Or for Family
  But the Restitution
  Of Idolatry.

                 1318
  Frigid and sweet Her parting Face--
  Frigid and fleet my Feet--
  Alien and vain whatever Clime
  Acrid whatever Fate.

  Given to me without the Suit
  Riches and Name and Realm--
  Who was She to withhold from me
  Penury and Home?

                  1568
  To see her is a Picture--
  To hear her is a Tune--
  To know her an Intemperance
  As innocent as June--
  To know her not--Affliction--
  To own her for a Friend
  A warmth as near as if the Sun
  Were shining in your Hand.