A Poet's Business: Love and Mourning in the Deathbed Poems of Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson begins a letter to her friends Dr. and Mrs. Holland, "I wrote to you. I receive no letter," and then defends her breech of decorum with characteristic extravagance: "Perhaps you laugh at me! Perhaps the whole United States are laughing at me too! I can't stop for that! My business is to love" (L269).¹ The loving action of writing and sending a letter in the face of her own wounded pride ("the little peacock in me") is motivated by a rumor that "'Mrs. Holland is not strong.'" It is the recognition of her friend's mortality "in a world where bells toll" that overcomes the writer's self-regarding reluctance: "The little peacock in me, tells me not to inquire again. Then I remember my tiny friend—how brief she is—how dear she is, and the peacock quite dies away."

If "to love" was Dickinson's most pressing duty to friends, loving, at least loving the mass of her contemporaries and her potential readers, does not, on the face of it, seem to have been the primary business of her poetry. Dickinson's poems, all but eleven of them unpublished until after her death, often refute or undermine the comforts of the religious certitude that many nineteenth-century American poets shared with and offered to their readers. The poems neither advocate social action nor elicit sympathy for social causes, and the difficulty of the verse itself has suggested to several critics that Dickinson is indifferent or at best inattentive to the needs of a potential audience larger than a few close friends.² Joanne Dobson reminds us that the American women writers who were Dickinson's contemporaries were encouraged to display altruistic motives for writing—either the concern for social justice that Dickinson's work conspicuously lacks or a desire to be a moral guide and companion to their readers (5-13). These are clearly not the kinds of "love" that Dickinson's poems can offer, either to her poetic subjects or to her readers.

I will maintain that there is a body of Dickinson poems—informed, like the letter quoted above, by the contemplation of mortality and mourning—that reveal a love for human beings and human life that is both particular and universal, and occasionally communal.³ In contrast to the poems and, of course, the fiction of many of her contemporaries, Dickinson's poems of mourning seldom offer identifiable characters or types that readers can grieve for or identify with. Instead, she performs a dissection of mourning, a process that defines and evaluates the essence of not just a given individual but human individuality itself. The narrators of Dickinson's deathbed poems frequently speak from within a group of undifferentiated, probably female, mourners watching over the approaching death. For the space of these poems a community is created, but because grief is revealed as a deeply interior experience, one that pervades the personal space Dickinson called "the Brain" as intimately as death itself pervades the tissues of the body, a circle of mourners is by its nature a circle of isolates, whose feelings may be shared but not fully articulated. Dickinson, who can seem so estranged from others, seeks to become in these poems the representative voice for this community of isolates. With the famous exception of "I heard a Fly buzz -" (P465), where the narrator recalls her own dying, the deathbed poems are small narratives that end with the altered lives of the living.

I am suggesting that such stories are love songs from Dickinson, but there is also, as Martha Nussbaum explains in an essay on emotion and the narrative, "a form of love in the silence, in the act of not structuring, not writing" (312). The "silence" that would ensue if the whole project of storytelling came to a halt would satisfy our desire for a teleology of unmediated experience, "a freedom, perhaps, from both making and being made" (311). There are Dickinson poems that are informed by exactly the desire for the freedom from speech that Nussbaum describes...