Tea for Two
Recently I wrote about Dickinson’s use of “coffee” in one of her poems and “tea” in a handful of others. One poem with “tea” which I did not share is below, “The grave my little cottage is.” Those of you with a fondness for the macabre will enjoy it! The speaker of the poem is dead and buried, residing in her “little cottage” (i.e., her grave), “keeping house,” and laying out “the marble tea” for a loved one she is expecting – soon – when they reunite for “everlasting life” in the society of those who passed before them.
The Amherst College Library Digital Collection’s page states this about the work's transcription (which is shown below below the quote):
“The transcription is part of the collection of transcriptions of Dickinson's poems produced by Mabel Loomis Todd for publication in a volume edited by her. Most transcriptions are in Todd's own hand; some are typed, and some were transcribed by other individuals. Editor's marks, alternate wording, and notations are written on the transcript. This transcription is part of the Printer's Copy for Poems: Third Series.”
On the bottom of the Amherst College Library's page (HERE), my little eye spied the logo for the IIIF, an entity I wrote about just yesterday (HERE):
You know I had to click on that!
Well, turns out the link below the logo in not a link on which to click. Instead, I had to copy and paste it into my browser, and I got this, HERE . It’s either metadata associated with the image of the transcript or with the entire page? One can also download the metadata – but the choices were all Greek to me!
Finally, I found this 1972 article in the New York Times, “Emily Dickinson still lives in Amherst." It describes Dickinson’s “little cottage” in Amherst’s West Cemetery where she is currently “keeping house" and serving tea -- and more! The complete article is included below the pic:
EMILY DICKINSON STILL LIVES IN AMHERST
By Nardi Reeder Campion
June 11, 1972
AMHERST, Mass.—One poem by Emily Dickinson, that gentle lyricist of death begins, “After a hundred years/Nobody knows the Place.” It is not quite true. After 86 years, the people of Amherst know the place where she is buried.
Somebody, probably more than one somebody, places flowers before her headstone, fresh daffodils in a careful bouquet, violets bunched childishly, backyard sunflower in a kitchen jar. Emily would be pleased. She lavished time and love on her garden and conservatory and once remarked, “Flowers are so enticing I fear they are sins—like gambling or apostasy.”
The woman Mark Van Doren called “much the best of women poets [who] comes near the crown of all poetry” lies in West Cemetery on Triangle Street in a plot enclosed by a newly‐painted wrought‐iron fence near the middle of the graveyard. There she is buried with her overpowering father, Edward Dickinson, his dutiful wife, Emily Norcross Dickinson, and their other unmarried daughter, Lavinia. But Emily's beloved brother Austin lies elsewhere, which at first seems odd because the five Dickinsons were seldom parted in life. As Emily wrote to Austin during his brief stay in Boston: “We're all unlike most everyone, and therefore more dependent on each other for delight.”
Austin Is buried with his wife Susan and their three children in his own plot, in Wildwood Cemetery, at the north end of town.
Like Coming to Tea
At West Cemetery a white porcelain knob opens the black gate marked EDWARD DICKINSON 1858, and a marble step leads to the family enclosure. To enter is a bit like dropping in for tea, something easier to do in death than in life with the aloof Dickinsons. Emily thought of it first:
The grave my little cottage is, Where “Keeping house” for thee I make my parlor orderly And lay the marble tea.
West Cemetery was important to Emily Dickinson. “I have often walked there sweet summer evenings,” she wrote, “and read the names on the stones, and wondered who would come and give me the same memorial.” Her own rectangular headstone, beneath the leafy canopy of a green ash, bears the inscription: EMILY DICKINSON BORN DEC. 10, 1830 CALLED BACK MAY 15, 1886. Prof. Richard Sewall of Yale, who has studied this most mysterious and elusive of women for 20 years, says the only things he is absolutely sure of are those two dates.
The phrase “called back” might be puzzling to those who recall that Emily had shocked intensely religious Amherst by refusing to join the church. “Some keep the Sabbath going to Church,” she wrote. “I keep it, staying at Home/With a Bobolink for a Chorister/and an Orchard/for a Dome.” And she described her Trinity this way: “In the name of the Bee/And of the Butterfly/And of the Breeze—Amen!” But Jay Leyda's impressive piece of scholarship, “The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson,” reveals that “Called Back” was an English novel Emily had liked. As she was dying she wrote her Norcross cousins in Cambridge; all she said was:
“Little Cousins, Called back. Emily.”
Death was the great subject for Emily Dickinson. As a girl she Wrote to a friend: “The other day I tried to think how 1 should look with my eyes shut, and a little white gown on, and a snowdrop on my breast; and I fancied I heard the neighbors stealing in so softly to look down in my face—so fast asleep —so still—Oh, Jennie, will you and I really become like this?”
Far removed from mere morbidity, Emily's relentless probing of the meaning of death produced some of her greatest poems, such as “Because Could Not Stop for Death” and “Safe in Their Alabaster Chambers.” It was her pervasive awareness of death that made life almost unbearably precious to her. “I find ecstasy in living,” she said. “The mere sense of living is joy enough.” These two sides of the Dickinson coin may account for the increasing interest in her today, especially among the young who share her absorption in awareness and death and her conviction that “Forever is composed of Nows.”
Amherst is in love with its most fa mous citizen. When the United States Postal Service issued an Emily Dickinson stamp, second in the American Poetry Series, the town staged a three‐day celebration. Putting aside its panic over real estate developers, snarled traffic and the student vote, this bustling city of colleges (town population: 13,000; student population: 21,035) feted Emily in lectures, seminars, music and readings, films, special exhibitions and guided tours. It was a splendid festival to honor the shy little woman who was a town legend during her lifetime and became a renowned poet only after death.
The Dickinsons have always been important here. Emily's grandfather was founder of Amherst College. Her father was the treasurer of the college and United States Representative. Her brother Austin succeeded their father as college treasurer and was for many years that New England phenomenon, the Town Moderator. But it was Emily, always dressed in white and writing secretly within the seclusion of her father's house, who has brought worldwide attention to Main Street, Amherst.
One can't help wondering what the author of “I'm Nobody” would think of having her picture on 130 million postage stamps. She called Fame (capitalization with Emily is both unpredictable and meaningful) “the one that does not stay,” and with good reason, for she saw only seven of her poems published. Today all of her 1,775 poems have been translated into 19 languages, and Buckingham's “Dickinson Bibliography” records 2,600 books, plays, dance dramas, articles, records and films that have been written about her.
Fortunes Change
Amherst's inscrutable poet in her “white seclusion” provokes overheated curiosity. Did she have one lover, or many lovers, or none? Did she seek fame or shun it? Was she crippled by a father fixation? Was she an agnostic, a manic‐depressive, a lesbian? Was she actually unbalanced? The questions about her are as numerous as the books about her. Last September The New York Times Book Review carried an article on the two most recent Emily “exposés” under the wry headline “Emily Dickinson as a Maternally Deprived Plagiarist.”
“All men say ‘what?’ to me,” she wrote. Today we would ask ‘why?’ Why, for the last half of her life, did she withdraw from the world? There are countless theories, but no clear answers. At Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke College she was shy but friendly; then gradually she retired from society and by the time she was 40 she was talking to friends through doors partially closed. When piano concerts were played for her, she listened hidden in the shadows of the hall. When she needed a new dress, the seamstress had to fit it to her sister. When she was sick, the doctor was expected to make his diagnosis as she walked past the door. It is all very puzzling and intriguing, but as she said in one of her poems, “The Riddle we can guess/We speedily despise.”
The magnet for the Emily buffs who make the pilgrimage to Amherst is the Dickinson mansion at 280 Main Street. Few places in the history of literature are as clearly associated with the creative act of writing as the brick house with the cupola on it that was built in 1813 by Emily's grandfather.
Emily was born there in 1830 and died there 55 years later, and it was behind the hemlock hedges that she found the “polar privacy” she needed to explore her inner experience. Perhaps the miracle of Emily's “magic prison” (her phrase, which Prof. David Porter of the University of Massachusetts says is typical of the poet's “linguistic stealth”) was that she did not need actual experiences. With her acute sensitivity she could Imagine all—love, death, immortality:
I never saw a Moor—I never saw the Sea—Yet know I how the Heather looks And what a Billow be.
I never spoke with God Nor visited in Heaven—Yet certain am I of the spot As if the Checks were given--
The guest book at Emily's house one day recently was signed by visitors from Japan, North Dakota, Norway and “Concord in spirit.” The house is owned by Amherst College, and Jean M. Mudge, who lives in it with her professor husband and children (including a daughter who is afraid of Emily's ghost), says that although 3,000 people have come there nothing has ever been taken and nobody smokes. Visitors are quiet, almost reverential. Clearly this is something special to them.
In the double living room are twin marble fireplaces decorated with marble grapes. It is easy to picture Emily and her family in the room: the strongwilled, pious father “coming out from the sanctity of his Sunday nap"; the gentle, self‐effacing mother always exclaiming, “Don't worry your father!"; the talented brother who, after Harvard Law School, never wished to spend even a vacation away from Amherst, and the “soft‐lipped, white‐skinned” sister whose low‐cut dresses distressed her father. (“Lavinia,” he'd snap, “put on a shawl.”) Emily's father died in this house when she was 44 and her mother died there eight years later. Two years after Edward Dickinson's death, Emily wrote her cousins: “I dream about father every night, always a different dream, and forget what I am doing daytimes, wondering where he is.” Emily and Lavinia lived out their years here alone, except for their Irish maid, Maggie Maher. Austin kept close watch over them from The Evergreens, the house
And how does one visualize Emily? In “Emily Dickinson, Friend and Neighbor,” MacGregor Jenkins, the minister's son who lived across the street, says, “In that house dwelt a Rare Presence a joyous person, slight of stature, quick and graceful, warm and impulsive, who had a perplexing habit of precipitous flight.” Emily was not shy with the neighborhood children but once, when giving them gingerbread in the kitchen, she remarked, “You know, dears, if the butcher boy should come now I would Jump into the flour barrel.”
Unfortunately, there are only three pictures of Emily Dickinson in existence: an oil portrait with Austin and Lavinia, done when they were children, which is in the Houghton Library at Harvard; a small silhouette, made when Emily was 14, and a daguerreotype of her at age 17, during the one year she attended Mount Holyoke College. The last two are so valuable they are locked in a vault in the Robert Frost Library at Amherst College and brought out only for big occasions such as the Emily Dickinson Stamp Festival. The daguerreotype is the picture that is always reproduced; a variation of it appears on the postage stamp. Emily's “self portrait,” written for her mentor, T. W. Higginson of The Atlantic Monthly, is equally famous: “I am small, like the wren, and my hair is bold, like the chestnut burr—and my eyes, like the sherry in the that the leaves.”
Higginson's pen portrait of his “partially cracked poetess” is not so kind. Emily was 40 when they first met in the Dickinson living room. Later he wrote his wife: “A step like a pattering child's and in glided a little plain woman with two smooth bands of reddish hair and a face... with no good feature —in a very plain & exquisitely clean white pique & a blue net worsted shawl. She came to me with two daylilies which she put in a sort of childlike way into my hand & said ‘These are my introduction’ in a soft frightened breathless childlike voice — & added under her breath ‘Forgive me if I am frightened; I never see grangers & hardly know what I say.” Higginson recorded her stream‐of‐consciousness chatter and then added: “I never was with anyone who drained my nerve power so much. Without touching her, she drew from me. I am glad not to live near her.”
It is Emily's bedroom that most excites the true Dickinson disciple. It was, literally, her world where “the Soul selects its own Society/Then—shuts the door.” There she wrote and polished her poems and stored them away, and it was there that Lavinia discovered them, neatly tied in packets, after her death.
Austin's daughter, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, remembered her Aunt Emily's room filled with the fragrance of the hyacinths that crowded all four window sills. “That west window of hers!” she wrote. “The stage box overlooking our personal dramal... no sleigh ‐ride counted unless Aunt Emily would look out as I coasted by... later I took my favorite beaus to stroll beneath her window where she examined them through swiftly drawn blinds.”
Letters Preserved
Although Emily was out of the world, she was still of it. She lived through her letters to friends and relatives. Luckily for us, hundreds of those letters have been preserved with their perceptive, witty comments on the world around her. From her four windows she “saw New Englandly,” describing the funeral across the street, the light on the Holyoke range (“my Alps”), the circus parading into town or Mrs. Sweetset “rolling out in crape to intimidate antichrist; at least It would have that effect on me.”
In the Amherst of today Emily is everywhere. The Community Chest banners quote her (“Hope is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul”), stores display her pictures and sell “The Emily Dickinson Year Book,” and the town library boasts an entire room devoted to Dickinson books and memorabilia. Gone are the days when a resident could say of her poems, “Believe me, boys, they're a bunch of broken bottles.” Or a Dickinson relative could remark, “Don't know why Emily made such fuss over daisies. To me they look like hard‐boiled eggs cut in two.”
Fame is indeed fickle. When Ralph Waldo Emerson visited Amherst, he stayed with the Austin Dlckinsons. In a December, 1857, Amherst paper tickets for Emerson's lecture were reduced from 25 cents to eight for $1. The editor added, “Few people can afford not to hear Ralph Waldo Emerson, when they can hear him for 121/2 cents.” There is no record that Emily either heard him speak or went next door to meet him, but it is fun to imagine what a furor the two of them would generate in this town today.
At the Dickinson stamp celebration it was Archibald MacLeish who put Emily precisely in her place: “The truth is that Emily Dickinson was that rarest of God's creatures, a great poet—creatures so rare that only a little company can be mustered from the whole of time.”
