Dickinson's Misery Read Online Free Page A

Cricket” can still seem the “utmost of Elegy, to Me—.” 22 That last prepositional phrase, signed “Emily” in the originalmanuscript, qualifies the problem of whether nature actually mourns and makes it a matter of personal, rather than cultural, perspective. The question is then how that personal perspective circulates, of what forms it takes, of what culture it may create.
    We do not have a record of Vanderbilt’s reply to Dickinson’s “Further in Summer than the Birds,” if she wrote one. We do know that Dickinson sent a similar set of lines to her cousins, Louise and Frances Norcross, perhaps also in 1865, but that manuscript has been lost. In 1866, Dickinson sent some of the same lines to Higginson ( figs. 14a , 14b ), accompanied by a note:
    Carlo died—
    E. Dickinson
    Would you instruct me now? 23
    Carlo, Dickinson’s Newfoundland dog, would have been about sixteen years old in 1866. 24 Since her first letter to him in 1862, Dickinson had been asking Higginson for “instruction” in writing, so perhaps she meant to present her lines as evidence of her attempt to write an elegy. But an elegy for what, or for whom? If Vanderbilt might have understood the lines sent to her in 1865 in the context of the aftermath of the war, did Higginson understand them as an elegy for a dog? In the version of the lines sent to Higginson, neither the invocation of national witness in the final lines to Vanderbilt nor the word “elegy” appears:
    Further in Summer
    than the Birds
    Pathetic from
    the Grass
    A minor nation
    celebrates
    It’s unobtrusive Mass.
    No Ordinance be
    seen
    So gradual the
    Grace
    A pensive Custom
    it becomes
    Enlarging Loneliness.
    Antiquest felt
    at noon
    When August
    burning low
    Arise the spectral
    Canticle
    Repose to typify
    Remit as yet
    no Grace
    No Furrow on the
    Glow
    Yet a Druidic
    Difference
    Enhances Nature now[.]
    Figure 14a. Emily Dickinson to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1866. Boston Public Library/Rare Books Department, Courtesy of the Trustees (Ms. AM 1093, 22).
    Figure 14b. Emily Dickinson to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1866. Boston Public Libaray/Rare Books Department, Courtesy of the Trustees (Ms. AM 1093, 22).
    Since Dickinson sent the lines to Higginson in late January 1866, they certainly did not refer to a current natural season, and if they may have resonated with a cultural season in the summer of 1865, then that resonance must have been fainter in the winter of 1866. Dickinson’s rather abrupt note to Higginson at the beginning of 1866 was actually the first letter she had sent to him since she had written to him in early June 1864, after learning that he had been wounded in battle in July 1863 and had left the Union army in May 1864. 25 Dickinson herself was in Cambridge under the care of a doctor for eye trouble in 1864; she had written to Higginson to ask if he were “in danger,” commenting that “Carlo did not come, because he would die, in Jail” (L 290). Thus the letter of 1866 picks up the thread of the dog’s health, but may also continue the oblique reference to the consequences of the war. The lines to Higginson that differ from those in the letter to Vanderbilt not only take out the earlier explicit reference to “elegy” but place the consequences of seasonal change earlier and further within the discourse of natural sympathy than did the lines to Vanderbilt. The first new line, “Antiquest felt,” puns on the Old World “Mass” and “Ordinance,” but shifts the language of outmoded “Custom” to the realm of individual sensibility, and that shift also changes what the ritual of the crickets is said to “typify.” The symbolic function of cricket song has moved away from the register of natural national “witness” in the lines to Vanderbilt; in the lines to Higginson, the still vaguely Catholic “Canticle” represents