A Yankee Poet's Irish Headwaters

On a day alternating sun and spit, I circled a mountain at the far reaches of South Tipperary that rises humpback from the farmscape. The Golden Vale it's called, a swath of fertile country by the River Anner, the lands of Ballypatrick and Sliabh na mBan ("Mountain of the Women"). To the west lies Killusty, a blackened churchyard at a curve in the road, and, on the north face, Killurney farmhouses hug a slope above Kilcash. In September, 2000, I traveled nine thousand miles to glimpse this mountain, a place of "origins" for a well-known American poet. Not her own lineage, exactly, but one she pointed to by a series of oblique gestures—of those who had made possible, in Seamus Heaney's words, "a course for the breakaway of innate capacity."¹

From the medieval walls behind P. J. Lonergan's pub in Fethard it is possible to take a long view across the Vale to Sliabh na mBan (in a nostalgic ballad, the Valley of Sweet Slievenamon). This is where I found myself contemplating the headwaters of Emily Dickinson's "long summons into the vocation of poetry." ² South Tipperary is a countryside so ample with poets and scholars that some nineteenth-century farmers were known to converse in Latin and Greek, and, by candlelight, to study Irish manuscripts. James Stephens wrote admiringly of the erudite farmers he met while sojourning in this part of nineteenth-century Ireland. At Nine Mile House, the Meagher family held literary evenings in their tavern for three generations. For many hundreds of years the literary sensibility has been honed and made rich as the soil of the Golden Vale itself. ³ Margaret Maher of Killusty and her brother-in-law, Thomas Kelley, from Killurney—two immigrants from the slopes of Sliabh na mBan—made their way in the mid-1850s to Amherst, Massachusetts where they became long-term servants for the family of Emily Dickinson. Each played a significant role in the life of the renowned American poet.

Eleven years after her mistress had been laid in the grave—by six Irish laborers whom Dickinson knew well and requested for pallbearers—maid Margaret Maher was asked if she had anything to do with Dickinson's poems, how and where they were kept. She replied, "She kept them in my trunk. . . .They were done up in small booklets, probably twelve or fourteen tied together with a string." ⁴ That this poor laboring woman had intimate knowledge of the exact size and nature of the poet's literary enterprise suggests that Maher was an authority on more than the contents of her trunk. Dickinson had not only trusted her maid with the fruits of her labor, but had also asked her to burn the poems when she died. Maher broke the apparent deathbed oath, appealing tearfully to Dickinson family members, and, thus, the manuscripts were saved. ⁵ Dickinson also honored Tom Kelley by requesting that he be her chief pallbearer. Her life and writings have been studied with precision and yet these signs have escaped notice; in the well-trod Dickinson story, the many permanent and seasonal servants have been overlooked.

Kathleen Fraser asks if there is a genetic propensity for making poetry; are some born into poetic language "as if the mind were waiting like a large empty page to be imprinted with the intaglio markings of the world crowding foreword to make its impress?" ⁶ The intaglio markings of Dickinson's first language came not just at her mother's breast but in the soothing arms of a maid who helped ease life in the early years of family increase. Most of those first family servants, often hired intermittently for specific tasks, were local African Americans and itinerant white workers from Vermont. ⁷ The young Emily would have spent much of the day with them, playing with dolls underfoot in the kitchen while the maid cooked or crouched in the barn, studying the...