The Alchemy of Unrequited Love and the Story Behind Emily Dickinson's Most Famous Poem – The Marginalian

This story is taken from chapter nineteen of my book Figuring.

In the early fall of her thirties, Emily Dickinson wrote to her confidante and eventual editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson:

I've been scared – since September – I haven't told anyone, so I'm singing, like the Boy does on Grounding Ground – because I'm scared.

Not “horror,” not “horror,” but a fear. What caused this greatness said by a woman who weighed her words carefully? Generations of biographers have filled the pages with various persuasive theories – death, the unwritten sorrow of his volcanic relationship with Susan, the first attack of epilepsy – but the most interesting theory came almost a century after the poet secretly wrote these words.

In 1951, after years of research and visits to various archives, scholar Rebecca Patterson proposed a candidate for the “fear” of 1861: Kate Scott Anthon – a recently widowed lady Susan had befriended during their studies at the Utica Female Academy and then introduced to Emily, who fell in love with a new and powerful. a relationship without meaning, dealing with the stress that Emily would experience as killing her and providing the raw material for many of her sad poems.

Their story is a mosaic gathered from various surviving documents, as straightforward as Emily's letters and as oblique as the marginalia in Kate's favorite books.

In the late winter of 1859, Kate sleighed in her fashionable black hat and widow's veil in front of a classmate's home in Amherst. Soon, Susan introduced him to a lovely short-haired friend who lived across the fence from the red-painted brick house and had heard of him for almost ten years. When Emily, wrapped in a merino shawl, met a tall, beautiful woman with piercing black eyes, a musical voice, and an overwhelming love of literature and astronomy, she was taken aback.

Within three weeks of Kate's first stay at Amherst, the two women, both twenty-eight, separated. They go on long walks with Emily's dog, Carlo, studying Aurora Leigh out loud to each other, and we spent the evening at the piano as Emily improvised – “strange and beautiful songs, all from her inspiration,” Kate will remember. As Emily played, Kate towered behind her – “Goliath,” the young poet called her.

As Kate walks home, Emily urges her to visit Amherst again:

I am sitting well in the depths of the sea, but love will row you, if his hands are strong, don't wait until I come to sit, because I am going to the shore on the other side.

Emily's first letters to Kate are electronic. Writing a few weeks after they first met, he tries to disguise by playing the push and pull of an irrepressible, frustrated longing in the botanical code language that was his first poetic language:

I've never missed Kate before. . . . Nice on my doorstep this March night is another Chosen One — Go Home! We don't like Katies here! — Stay! My heart goes out to you, and what can I really object to his vote -? What are your qualifications? Do you live in Mpumalanga where we live? Are you afraid of the Sun? – When you feel the new violet sucking its way through the sod, will you be determined?… Will you still come?… Kate gathered in March! It is a small bouquet, dear — but what it lacks in size, it gains in infinity, — Many can boast the hollyhock, but few can bear the rose! … So I get up, wearing her – so I sleep, holding, – Finally I sleep with my hand and wake up carrying my flower. –

In the late winter of 1860, they spend a night together in Emily's room – unwritten, unintelligible, except perhaps in verse:

His sweet weight on my heart all night
He didn't lie—
There, moving, for the joy of Faith,
My bride was gone –

If it was a dream – made strong – just
Heaven will make sure –
Or if I dream of him—
The power of imagination –

A few weeks after that momentous night, Emily would pass on this precious spoil in a letter to Kate:

Finding is slow, losing resources often, in a world like this, I hold with great caution. So much wisdom may seem unnecessary, but abundance motivates those in need… Have you ever been poor? I be be a Supplicant.

Regardless of what happened between them, they did not speak freely – it is always impossible to determine what can happen between two people, but especially in a time and place that prevents the discovery of small limits of permissible love. Feeling that everything was impossible, Emily shuddered at the loss she expected:

Kate, Your sweet face apparently stands in its phantom place – I touch your hand – my cheek on your cheek – I stroke your lost hair, Why do you intervene, sister, as you must go? His heart was not sad enough but you must send your piece?… There is a subject, dear, that we never touch.

Little is known about Kate's side of the experience. None of his letters to Emily survived. (The poet had ordered his sister to burn all the books after his death – a request that Lavinia Dickinson quickly obliged before receiving a large number of poems that made her realize that her sister's books may have a very large reading value.) But Kate – who signed many of her remaining letters to other writers “Thomas” or “Tommy” or “Tommy” was responsible for the longevity of women, which culminated later in life in a long-term relationship with a young English woman.

Perhaps at the age of twenty-eight, he was not yet ready to completely dismantle the state of his life as he knew how. In April 1861, he separated from Emily. There is no record of what was said, but the damage was complete and lifelong. Years later, Emily wrote to Higginson:

If you ever lost a friend… you remember that you couldn't start over because there was no world—

Breathing death is not as cold as breathing death.

Immediately after the loss, he vacillated between hope and despair, as we all do when we are suddenly abandoned. A month after his “fear,” which may have been his painful acceptance that Kate was gone, his friend Samuel Bowles – whose newspaper had printed one of only four poems published in his lifetime – came to Amherst. He refused to see her. Most of his contemporary writings were burned, but Samuel was one of his closest friends—he may have confided his grief to him, if not the source of it. “We tell Hurt to chill,” he wrote in the poem. Among his letters is one from that summer to a redacted recipient – an unusual letter of comfort to someone crushed by unrequited love, someone who might have been Emily:

My dear – :

… You must give if you expect to receive — give happiness, friendship, love, happiness, and you will find them floating back to you. Sometimes you will give more than you get. We all do that in some of our relationships, but it is as true a joy to give without return as life can give us. We should not bargain with each other's heart, as we will with his butcher. Our business is to give what we have to give – what we can get to give. The return has nothing to do with it… No one will give us what we give them—others will give us more than we can or give them—so the accounts will balance themselves. So it is with my love and friendship – so it is with all people.

Emily wasn't ready to let go of the love she had given, hoping that one day it might return, even though it had been soaked and changed into something else. She wrote to Kate in tears:

How many years, I wonder, will I sow moss over them, before we bind again, a little changed, it would be, a little old the will be, yet the same, like the suns that shine between our lives and losses, and the violets.

During that time, he composed his most famous poem – read here by twenty-first-century children yet to experience love and loss, and translated by artist Olga Ptashnik:

“Hope” is a feathered thing –
That which dwells in the heart –
And sings a song without words –
And he doesn't stop – at all –

And the sweetest – in Gale – sounds –
And there must be a bitter storm –
That would make the little bird angry
That kept many warm –

I heard you in the coldest land—
And in the strange Sea –
However – never – in Extremity,
It asked the crumbs – to me.

“Life is long,” a poet friend told me recently when I was dealing with a similar outburst. But life was not long for Emily Dickinson, who died suddenly at the age of 50, not a single gray in her hot hair in a small white box that covered her body and a posy of violets. Life is a feather borrowed from the fleeting wing of time. If she had lived longer, maybe Kate would have returned to spend the rest of her days with Emily and not her lover in England, or maybe they would have met again in complete despair, in perfect friendship. The word “if” is the broadest word of all, the vast universe in which all of our possible lives reside. Hope is what we call the bridge between the universe and that.