Dickinson's Misery Read Online Free Page B

midday “Repose.” But whose repose? The abstraction of the lines to Higginson align the day’s apex with individual pathos and then align both with an even older, more culturally misplaced religious rite, a “Druidic / Difference.” The lines are certainly more abstract than were the lines sent to Vanderbilt, but the relation between natural and cultural expression—or the problem of what form expression should take—has become more acute.
    If that problem may have attached itself to the historical climate in the seasons just after the war, or even to the death of Carlo in 1866, it wouldhave presented itself very differently seventeen years later when Dickinson sent the lines she had sent to Higginson to Thomas Niles. Niles was the chief editor at Roberts Brothers, the publisher that would issue the first volumes of Dickinson’s poems in the 1890s. He had initiated a correspondence with Dickinson in 1878, after he had published a Dickinson poem in the anonymous collection A Masque of Poets. 26 In 1883, Dickinson wrote to thank him for a copy of the Roberts Brothers’ edition of Mathilde Blind’s Life of George Eliot, writing, “I bring you a chill Gift—My Cricket and the Snow” (L 813). She then included the lines she had sent to Higginson in 1866 in the letter before her signature ( figs. 15a , 15b , 15c ), and separately enclosed the lines that became “It sifts from Leaden Sieves—” (F 291). Though Niles apparently addressed Dickinson several times, asking for “a M.S. collection of your poems, that is, if you want to give them to the world through the medium of a publisher” (L 813b), she sent only what she called such “gifts,” naming them as if they were the objects they described: “My Cricket and the Snow,” or “the Bird … a Thunderstorm—a Humming Bird … a Country Burial” (L 814). Dickinson’s objectification of her writing mirrored her own practice of including objects with or within the writing; like the pressed flowers, dead insects, assorted clippings, or illustrations that often accompanied the lines she addressed to particular correspondents, the “gifts” sent to Niles were marked by the singular rather than the commodity form—or at least that is the way Niles himself seems to have understood Dickinson’s intention. “I am very much obliged to you for the three poems which I have read & reread with great pleasure,” he wrote to Dickinson in 1883, “but which I have not consumed. I shall keep them unless you order me to do otherwise—” (L 814a). The intimacy supposed by the exchange of the singular object obliges its recipient to keep it, and his relationship to the giver, to himself. 27 But we know that the verse Dickinson referred to as “My Cricket” was not a singular object—on the contrary, it was a text she had circulated to various correspondents over the course of over sixteen years. By sending it to Niles, a publisher she would never meet, did she not intend to widen those conditions of circulation, to go public? If the difference between a singular object and a commodity is the exchange value of that object, then we would have to say that by sending her verse to Niles, Dickinson was potentially increasing the exchange value of her writing, or bringing it closer to the commodity form. 28
    Yet as history would have it, not until seven years later, after her death, did Niles and Roberts Brothers publish in what Austin Warren would later call “slim grey volumes” the verse that Higginson would so emphatically characterize as “something produced absolutely without the thought of publication, and solely by way of expression of the writer’s own mind” ( Poems 1890, iii). 29 Whatever Dickinson’s own intentions may have been, the fact that Niles chose not to publish her poems until they could be circulated as if not