Emily Dickinson: Against Intimacy

OF THE REAMS OF COMPLETE POEMS, drafts, letters, and scrap paper found in Emily Dickinson’s bedroom after she died, many – despite considerable critical attention – remain obscure to us. One such document (fig. 1), a piece of lined paper with a poem written on it in pencil, was likely composed around 1880, towards the end of Dickinson’s life. The poem is about a kind of intimacy: Of whom so dear The name to hear Suffuses illumines with a Glow As intimate – as fugitive – magical As Sunset on the snow – Whose ‘name’ is Dickinson writing about? The mystery of the passage is part of its appeal. The name in question could be God’s, and the light of a sunset reflecting on the snow might be the divine light, incarnate in nature, which Dickinson is trying to celebrate. Equally, it could be the name of someone in particular: maybe ‘dear Sue’, Susan Huntington Dickinson, her sister-in-law and (by many accounts) her lover; maybe her father, who had died a few years earlier; maybe Otis Lord, one of the men with whom critics have suggested she was in love at one time or another in her life. Like many of Dickinson’s other missives, the manuscript is folded as if it were a letter or a note, though we don’t know to whom this was sent, or indeed if it was sent to anyone at all. Nonetheless, to read a manuscript like this – a private document, albeit one nowadays available to view as a jpeg file online – feels like having access to a secret. We apparently get to know something that shouldn’t usually belong to us; parsing it is intimate, tracking its author’s thoughts and feelings with (perhaps embarrassing) proximity.