Emily Dickinson Stops the Clocks
A new reading of her poem “The Longest Hour”
Emily Dickinson had a bureau in her bedroom and a wooden chest. These receptacles held Dickinson’s personal tickets to Eternity.
One or both of the wooden chambers was the repository for Dickinson’s hand-sewn booklets of poetry (“fascicles” as they later came to be called), along with unattached poems on sheets of cream stationery and strange jottings on scraps of paper — “gorgeous nothings” — all scrawled in her slanted, nearly-illegible handwriting.
For years the weight of paper gathered incrementally in these two private realms of wood and darkness. Only Dickinson herself knew how much poetry was there, knew what it said, and knew — and she surely did know — that it was “alive.”
By the accretion of her pages, the chest and the bureau drawer were a kind of clock, measuring the passage of Dickinson’s life, like sand increasing in the bottom of an hourglass.
I often notice how ordinary things in daily life are disguised clocks, marking the passage of Time in their own unique ways.
The tube of toothpaste is a clock on the bathroom sink, starting life as a robust tube, shrinking daily in small, equal increments, and ending with the life squeezed out of it.
The box of 100 coffee filters in the kitchen cabinet marks the passage of 100 mornings, one at a time.
The coat closet is a calendar of the seasons as we swap heavy coats for lighter jackets and vice-versa.
The worn-down heels of our shoes measure years.
And our filing cabinets grow by accretion as we add tax forms, birthday cards, medical records, and perhaps our own heart-felt attempts at creative writing.
Our personal journey through Time is clocked in countless quotidian ways. And then inevitably all our clocks stop at once, just like Grandfather’s Clock stopped ticking “when the old man died.”
In Dickinson’s case, the growing cache of poetry stopped — never to grow again — on Saturday, May 15, 1886 when an ailing Dickinson “put on Immortality,” as her preceptor and friend Thomas Wentworth Higginson said at her funeral service in the family library a few days later.
She was 55 years old when her Time ended. Nothing further would originate from her.
Meeting a mentor
Twenty five years earlier, Dickinson had sent a letter to Higginson — a total stranger — with four poems and asked if he could say whether the poems were “alive.” Higginson was a notable essayist, Unitarian minister, abolitionist, and radical feminist. Dickinson had presumably read his Atlantic Monthly essay in April 1862 offering publishing advice to young writers, both gentlemen and, radically for the time, young ladies.
Higginson read the poems and was bedazzled and baffled by their strangeness, originality, and intensity. Their strange relationship continued for 25 years by letter (they only met in person twice), ending at Dickinson’s funeral.
Although he may not have truly understood Dickinson’s extraordinary mind and art, he knew in 1862 that her poetry was very much “alive.” Higginson was by this time an eminent public thinker, speaker, and published essayist, an abolitionist who had secretly funded John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, and a battle-tested Colonel in the Civil War who led a regiment of freed slaves. Dickinson was “Nobody.”
But she was a “Nobody” who could stun her distinguished “mentor.” In a letter written in 1869, seven years into their correspondence and one year before they met in person, Higginson gives a good sense of their intense and incongruous relationship:
Sometimes I take out your letters and verses, dear friend, and when I feel their strange power, it is not strange that I find it hard to write & that long months pass. I have the greatest desire to see you, always feeling that perhaps if I could take you by the hand I might be something to you; but till then you only enshroud yourself in this fiery mist & I cannot reach you, but only rejoice in the rare sparkles of light.
He is smitten. Decrying the “fiery mist” that makes Dickinson unreachable for him, Higginson essentially defines the relationship between Dickinson and her bedazzled readers that will persist for the next century and a half. In his letter, he continued:
Every year I think that I will contrive somehow to go to Amherst & see you; but that is hard, for I often am obliged to go away for lecturing, &c. . . I would gladly go to Boston, at any practicable time, to meet you. I am always the same toward you, & never relax my interest in what you send me. I should like to hear from you very often, but feel always timid lest what I write should be badly aimed & miss that fine edge of thought which you bear. . . I think if I could once see you & know that you are real, I might fare better. . . You must come down to Boston sometime. All ladies do. . . Write & tell me something in prose or verse, & I will be less fastidious in future & willing to write clumsy things, rather than none. . .”
Dickinson did not come to Boston, but Higginson did finally make the sojourn to Emily’s home in Amherst where they met, she talked nonstop, and he left hopelessly enthralled and in a state of nervous exhaustion. “I was never with any one who drained my nerve power so much,” he told his wife.
On the Ides of May, 1886, the last day of a long week, Death kindly stopped for Dickinson, and her mortal remains were buried in a white dress and bedecked in flowers inside a white coffin, per her instructions. Her small circle of bereft survivors had to adjust to a world without their Emily. All that was left for the family to do now was close out the various and sundry effects of a completed life.
But there was that wooden chest. And that unopened bureau drawer. Their poetic contents were waiting to be found, and they were “alive.”
A week after the funeral, Emily’s beloved sister Lavinia entered her bedroom to begin to sort through her effects, and she discovered the unexpected treasure trove. Now lifted from its place of darkness, Emily Dickinson’s corpus of poetry would shortly create great sparks of light and begin to live and thrive in the collective mind of the world.
That moment of discovery is surely among the greatest moments in the history of the literary world.
Saving Dickinson’s poetry
The exact details of how Dickinson’s manuscripts came to light are all a little wiggly. Dickinson had left detailed instructions for her own carriage ride to Eternity, including the directive to destroy her papers. While it was customary to burn private correspondence that the deceased had retained, Dickinson apparently left instructions to burn everything, including her unseen poetry.
Although Lavinia was not a poet or an artist or a deep thinker, she was a deeply devoted sister who knew when she found Emily’s secret life’s work that, at minimum, Emily must have the recognition that the world had not accorded her. She knew the countless unseen poems in the chest had to be sorted and published, come what may.
It is well established that it was Lavinia who found the poetry in the bedroom bureau within a week of her sister’s death. Dickinson had begun organizing her fascicles many years before, and these hand-sewn bundles had to go somewhere. Likewise her single-sheeted poetry, her many letters received from many correspondents over the decades, and the jottings on paper scraps.
Her writing desk was a mere 18 inch square with a small drawer to hold a pen and ink. She needed a trunk. Whether she had an organizing principle for storing all her papers is unknown (to me, at least).
Similarly unsettled is to whom Dickinson left the task of getting rid of all the papers — Lavinia or the trusted house maid Maggie Maher. The historical record is clear that Lavinia was stunned by the discovery and, rather than burn her sister’s poetic efforts, took steps to get the poems readied for publication of some sort.
But according to Jerome Charyn in his excellent study of Dickinson’s life, “A Loaded Gun,” it was Maggie to whom Dickinson entrusted the task of getting rid of everything, and it was the devoted Maggie who couldn’t bring herself — or perhaps suspected that Dickinson didn’t actually want her to — destroy the poetry. Maggie put all the poetry in the bureau where she knew Lavinia would find them. And Lavinia took it from there.
Interestingly, Charyn also notes that, among the papers Maggie saved from destruction is the only authenticated daguerrotype of Dickinson as a teenager, the one we’ve all seen.
A second photograph of a more mature Dickinson with a female friend surfaced a few years ago — a story unto itself.
Refusing to compromise
A clock stopped for Dickinson when she died. But her poetry has its own clock, and it is not winding down.
Inside her household, Dickinson had never hidden her fervid versifying. Although she wrote in the privacy of her bedroom and mostly at night, she sent hundreds of poems to the outside world, embedded in personal letters which were themselves a kind of belletristic poetry.
As her sister-in-law and closest confidante Susan Dickinson wrote in an unsigned obituary (published in the Springfield Republican):
Her talk and her writings were like no one else’s, and although she never published a line…, many saw and admired her verses.
By “many,” Susan meant the villagers in Amherst where “the facts of her seclusion and intellectual brilliancy were familiar Amherst traditions.”
Susan noted, too, that a small number of “notable persons” recognized something startling and unique in Emily’s “swift poetic rapture,” but none could “overcome the protest of her own nature.”
That “nature” was her refusal to compromise her own unique standards of language, thought, and belief, or to let others clip the wings of her poetry by editing and blunting its sharp edges with proper form. Even though it meant the poems would go unpublished.
Emily Dickinson was “scheduled” by Time to be forgotten, to become “a flake gathered by the wind and… part of the drift called ‘the Infinite’,” as she said in a letter when her mother died.
With her passing, the Town of Amherst was losing its favorite topic of local speculation and gossip regarding the eccentric spinster from a prominent family who dressed only in ghostly white and had withdrawn entirely from society.
The Dickinson family itself was winding down as death followed death. The 19th century was approaching its own end. Times would soon change dramatically, as times do. There was no reason to believe that, outside old town records and fading memories, the legacy of a strange, brilliant, reclusive woman would persist into the 20th century.
When sister Lavinia and faithful servant Maggie first peered into the coffin-like wooden chest and into the bureau drawer, they could not possibly suspect the significance — the sheer genius — of the unseen work that Emily had laid to rest there.
Even the select society of those with whom Dickinson shared her poems — her “mentor” Higginson, the writer Helen Hunt Jackson, and her beloved Susan — had no idea of what was “alive” in that wooden chest, nor how much was there.
Dickinson’s posthumous fame
No one anticipated that her first posthumous volume in 1890 would achieve instant popularity and go through 11 editions in the next two years. No one could foresee the popular success of the next two volumes that followed in the 1890’s.
And certainly no one expected the explosion of interest in her poems in the coming century. Emily’s bundles and scatters would surprise, puzzle, awe, and inspire countless poets, scholars, composers, readers both ordinary and extraordinary, at home and abroad.
No one could foresee how the growing enchantment and engagement with her poetry and letters would persist unabated for a century and a half so far, and counting.
A clock stopped for Dickinson when she died. But her poetry has its own clock, and it is not winding down.
What lay ahead for the scholarly world in the 20th century was the immense task of finding, sorting, transcribing, reassembling, dating, and enumerating Dickinson’s body of written work.
She left poems, letters, jottings, notations, edits, and reworkings, seemingly bottomless in quantity, runic in meaning, and timeless in quality. It took several generations of scholarship to figure out how to approach Dickinson’s unorthodox verse.
And to complicate matters , it took a long, painful, litigious century for all of her work to get out into the world. (The “war of the houses,” as it has been called, is the subject of countless books and academic papers. How a hushed family drama could become a cottage industry for literary historians would have been inconceivable and surely most distressing to Emily herself.)
For us lucky 21st century inhabitants, every last poem has found its way into print with Dickinson’s intended eccentricities of language intact.
“The Longest Hour”
Nothing can tame Dickinson’s stunning pieces, and it is time to read one of them. There are many, and they are often uncommonly difficult. Meeting Dickinson in print requires engagement, patience, and re-reading.
I like to open up my edition of her complete poems to a random poem and force myself to grapple with it. I have read a few hundred poems of hers by now, but since she wrote nearly two thousand, a few hundred is not much. More often than not, my randomly selected poem is one I haven’t seen before.
I’ve posted about my earlier random picks here and here.
Anyway, here’s the latest epiphany:
I think the longest Hour of all
Is when the Cars have come —
And we are waiting for the Coach —
It seems as though the Time
Indignant — that the Joy was come —
Did block the Gilded Hands —
And would not let the Seconds by —
But slowest instant — ends —
Pendulum begins to count —
Like little Scholars — loud —
The steps grow thicker — in the Hall —
The Heart begins to crowd —
Then I — my timid service done —
Tho’ service ‘twas, of Love —
Take up my little Violin —
And further North — remove –
Something has arrived that the speaker and her companion(s) (“we”) have been waiting for. Since “Cars” cannot mean automobiles, it must mean the cars of a train, and indeed the only other time Dickinson used the word “cars” in writing, she referred to “trains of cars on tracks of plush.” (It’s a poem about a bee.)
The train has arrived, “the Joy was come,” and now “we are waiting for the Coach” to bring the Joy home from the train station. Who or what is the Joy? A family member? A lover? A young Amherst soldier safely returning from the Civil War? Or is the Joy a thing? A gift? News of some sort?
Although the “gilded hands” of a Clock ticks in fixed increments, Time itself does not. In response to the speaker’s impatient anticipation, Time is not letting the seconds go by.
Time toys with us mortals, thwarts us, slows when we want it to hurry, and speeds when we want it to slow.
Time is affronted by our desire to bend it to our will.
Indeed, “Affronted” is the word Dickinson herself used in her handwritten manuscript as a possible substitute for “Indignant.”
But during one’s life what Time cannot do is stop. One’s life and experience cannot be outside Time, as it was before birth and will be after death. Elsewhere Dickinson wrote: “Behind Me — dips Eternity –/ Before Me — Immortality –/ Myself — the Term between –.”
Life is a short break from eternal timelessness. And while, in the midst of life, Time may slow to a crawl, it will not pause. It is “pauseless,” Dickinson tells us in “Behind Me dips Eternity.” Time can delay Joy, or it can expand Pain, but on the short march from Eternity to Immortality, its “slowest instant” must end and a new instant must begin.
Time, after all, marches on.
And so, as the pendulum in today’s poem resumes its steady pace, its ticking grows louder like children, “little Scholars,” running and shouting in the Hall.
Time has resumed, life has resumed, perhaps the family has returned from a trip, and the narrator’s “Heart begins to crowd.” Having completed her “timid service” of Love by making Time at long last yield to Joy, the narrator can now remove herself from this homecoming society.
For Dickinson, this would mean heading upstairs — “further North” — to her bedroom with her “little Violin,” that is, her voice, her words, her poetry.
But as is so often the case, there are other ways to read this poem.
Till the end of time
Dickinson’s modern editors have determined that “I Think the Longest Hour” was written in 1863. Only a year before Dickinson created what surely is one of the most famous carriage scenes in all literature:
Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.
There’s a good chance you’ve already read this poem. But if not, the full poem is here. In a scene that Ingmar Bergman would have created if Dickinson hadn’t gotten there first, the speaker recalls her leisurely ride in a horse-drawn carriage with Death, her gentlemanly (and only) companion.
Death “knew no haste” because “haste” is a construct of time, and death knows nothing of time or haste. The speaker has put away her labor and her leisure, she tells us. After all, she will no longer need or have the time for the activities of daily life.
They pass the school (childhood), they pass the fields (maturity), they pass the setting sun (well, obvious), and they come to a house — and there they pause. The house seems to be just a swelling of the ground, and only the uppermost parts of its former architecture is still visible. It is a tombstone, essentially, and the earth has swallowed it.
And then in the last stanza, the speaker ends her remembrance of the fateful ride and comes to the present moment: “Since then — ‘tis Centuries — and yet/ Feels shorter than the day/ I first surmised the Horses’ Heads/ Were toward Eternity.” Time has collapsed. The riders have come to the End of Time.
A horse-drawn carriage is a perfect vehicle, at least metaphorically, for the journey to the afterlife. Has the macabre carriage in “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” returned in “I Think the Longest Hour?”
Is the poem I chanced upon about the arrival of death?
Are the “cars” what brought the mourners together to wait for the “Carriage” that will carry the dying person home?
And is Time indignant about the dying person’s “Joy” in approaching Eternity?
Are the steps in the Hall those of the mourners?
And is the speaker’s Heart crowding with grief, so much so that she must take her mournful violin and leave?
I am not persuaded of this interpretation, but one person who thinks so is my favorite Dickinson enthusiast and writer of The Prowling Bee (I can’t recommend the site highly enough). There are too many light touches in this poem to carry the weight of a death watch or a funeral procession. The Joy, the little Scholars, the crowded Heart, the service of Love, the little violin — these do not add up. I don’t hear Fate bolting the door in this poem. When Dickinson feels a funeral in her brain, there’s no mistaking it.
But that is the bottomless beauty of Dickinson’s poetry. I have my own ideas about a poem, and then another idea appears and I have to reread each word, each dash, each grammatical ellipsis. You have to embrace uncertainty when you read Dickinson. She’s not going to tell you everything. She’s not going to tell you what to think.
The uncertainty keeps her poems ticking. They are alive.
For more GLT essays related to women writers, see this list:
