EMILY DICKINSON IN LOVE: The Case for Otis Lord

8. Aetherial Throng

j 8 j AETHERIAL THRONG ying on her bed comatose, her breathing loud, rasping, and ragged, from about 10 a.m. on May 13 to about 6 p.m. on May 15: this is not the way death ordinarily comes for the unfortunate victim of Bright’s disease. Coma and convulsions are associated with the deadly ailment, but labored breathing long continued, no. Such extreme respiratory difficulty as gripped Emily for some sixty interminable hours before she died indicates that some other pernicious cause was involved besides Bright’s disease. Something was at work in her system beyond the complications to be expected from her diagnosed ailment. Concerning Emily’s final two years of invalidism there is one thing that needs to be understood, her attitude toward her own existence : she’d had enough of it. Physically enervated—in fact hovering every moment on the brink—often dispirited and depressed, thinking incessantly of Lord, she was ready to surrender—and said so. During these months her desponding attitude so grew on her that among the fifty or so little verses she wrote, fully half reflect what can only be called a morbid interest in the subject of death. Revealing phrases such as “the cordial grave” occur often, as well as references to the enticing way in which death “beckons spaciously.” In two of her poems the beckoning grave finds frank expression. Pointedly she asks, 112 j Aetherial Throng 113 . . . to that aetherial throng Has not each one of us the right To stealthily belong? Even in so short a passage the larger meaning can hardly be missed, the “aetherial throng” being plain enough, and the word stealthily carrying a note that might have alarmed her family. In still other unguarded lines she openly states her hurry to be gone, her impatience with continued life: The spirit looks upon the dust That fastened it so long with indignation. How is it possible, she asks in another poem, to avoid the sorrow and woe that “the Future” always seems to threaten? Even as she poses the question she supplies the answer: Is there no wandering route of grace That leads away from thee, No circuit sage of all the course Descried of cunning men, To balk thee of thy sacred Prey Advancing to thy Den . . . The “wandering route” of course is death, the only means by which to “balk,” or escape, an earthly future—a route deliberately chosen, she implies. At last she speaks the thought outright, voicing a paradoxical complaint that life was holding back what she wanted most, a heavenly reunion with “thee,” of course Judge Lord: So give me back to death, The death I never feared, Except that it deprived of thee; And now in my own grave I breathe And estimate its size: The Love Affair 114 Its size is all that Hell can guess, And all that Heaven was. Life itself, she laments, has for her become a grave. Compared to the Heaven she knew while Lord lived, existence with him gone is a living Hell: “So give me back to death.” If such doleful thoughts found expression in so many of her verses written during this time, what might she have been saying in the privacy of her letters? As it happens, leaping from one of them is a brief passage, written only a month before she died, which directly invokes the memory of the most famous suicide in literature , Shakespeare’s Romeo. Quoting a line from Romeo and Juliet— “I do remember an Apothecary”—she calls it “a loved paragraph which has lain on my pillow all winter.” The letter was written in mid-April, and she specifies “all winter,” so for something like four months she has been reading and rereading the scene in which the doomed young lover, distraught over Juliet’s supposed death, visits an apothecary’s shop to buy “A dram of poison” (5.1). Handed a powder, “to put in any liquid,” he leaves the shop saying, “Come cordial , and not poison, go with me / To Juliet’s grave” (5.1). At the tomb he swallows the poison, murmuring as he dies, “O true apothecary !” (5.3). But Romeo was not the only literary suicide to catch Emily’s attention in those final months. The tragic figure of Heathcliff, the savage hero of Wuthering Heights, occupied her equally, if not more. For the Brontë novel, it is...