The Child’s Faith Is New
The Child’s faith is new – Whole — like His Principle —
Wide – like the Sunrise On fresh Eyes —
Never had a Doubt —
Laughs — at a scruple – Believes all sham
But Paradise — [#701]
In 1830, the year in which Emily Dickinson was born, some 2,600 people lived in Amherst, which consisted of a bare, unkempt common, a small commercial center, a few churches, assorted buildings attached to the struggling college, dirt roads, footpaths, and a number of isolated homes and farmhouses. Amherst had no rail service until 1853, no telegraph office until 1861, and no permanent bank until 1864. In every way, it was set apart from the manufacturing and mercantile centers of the eastern seaboard.
Only one hundred miles to the east, Salem and Boston had developed into centers of international trade and transport, while Amherst remained an outpost on the agricultural frontier. In the words of a noted later resident of the town, in the middle decades of the nineteenth century “Amherst was hardly more than a cluster of farms, each with its woodshed, barn and outhouses.”
“MEMORY DRAPES HER LIPS”
A few hundred yards to the east of this center of Amherst, Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born at 5 a.m. on Friday, December 10, 1830.
As one might expect with a second child born to a family struggling to repair damages to its fortunes, Emily’s early years were largely unremarkable. There are only a few isolated references to her in the surviving correspondence from her relatives and immediate family. The first recorded words of hers are in letters written by her aunt Lavinia Norcross, who had taken Emily to live with her when Mrs. Dickinson had trouble recovering from the birth of her third child, Lavinia, in 1833.
On their way to nearby Monson, aunt and niece were caught in a thunderstorm. Two-year-old “[Emily] Elizabeth called it the fire” and “felt inclined to be frightened some — she said ‘Do take me to my mother.”” Days later, Aunt Lavinia reported that Emily “has learned to play on the piano — she calls it the moosic.” In every way, she seemed to be “a very good child & but little trouble —… She has a fine appetite & sleeps well & I take satisfaction in taking care of her.” (It is worth noting that even at this early date, family members were worried about the emotional balance of Mrs. Dickinson; while caring for Emily, Lavinia Norcross admonished her sister, “You must not worry your-self more than you can help – for there is nothing so wearing as anxiety -“)
Dickinson’s adult recollections of her own childhood point to nothing more than the customary terrors and delights of early life. For example, Dickinson wrote years later to her cousins that when she was a baby, “father used to take me to mill for my health. I was then in consumption! While obtained the ‘grist,’ the horse looked round at me, as if to say eye hath not seen or ear heard the things that” I would do to you if I weren’t tied!”
In some cases in her memory, fear is traced to its religious source: “When a tew years old – I was taken to a Funeral which I now know was of peculiar distress, and the Clergyman asked ‘Is the Arm of the Lord shortened that it cannot save?” A similar incident is recorded in a fragment the poet left behind at death:
We said she said Lord Jesus — receive my Spirit — We were put in separate rooms to expiate our temerity and thought how hateful
Jesus must be to get us into trouble when we had done nothing but Crucify him and that before we were born –
A final fragment sums up the mystery of childhood and memory for the adult poet:
Two things I have lost with Childhood – the rapture of losing my shoe in the Mud and going Home barefoot, wading for Cardinal flowers and the mothers reproof which was more for my sake than her weary own for she frowned with a smile [now Mother and Cardinal flower are parts of a closed world — ] But is that all I have lost — memory drapes her Lips.
The imagery Dickinson employs here to describe her adult memory of a lost childhood is revealing. Her phrase “memory drapes her Lips” calls to mind similar language from her poems and letters, for she frequently employed images of dumb silence to depict God, nature, and the dead. Just as her own childhood was muffled in memory, the great divine and natural forces arrayed against her often seemed mute. “I know that He exists./Somewhere — in silence —/He has hid his rare life,” one poem reports of God [#365]; another asks of the “Bees,” “In those dim countries where they go,/What word had they, for me?” [#347]; and from the dead person, whose mouth is “the awful rivet” and whose lips are “hasps of steel,” one can expect no answer to one’s questions: “How many times these low feet staggered —/Only the soldered mouth can tell” [#238]. For the dead about to go to heaven and meet God, Dickinson has many questions:
That could I snatch Their Faces
That could Their lips reply
Not till the last was answered
Should They start for the Sky – [#1074]
But those lips, of course, would make no reply.
Dickinson refused to sentimentalize the silence by putting words into the mouths of the mute realities she questioned. That refusal put her at odds with the romantic poetic tradition and with the sentimental culture of the mid-nineteenth century. Where she detected silence, they heard voices everywhere.
While Dickinson could never get past the “awful rivet” of “the soldered mouth,” William Wordsworth, for instance, had a robust romantic confidence that the living could commune with the dead. In the words of Gerald Bruns, Wordsworth was “a connoisseur of epitaphs” who felt that an epitaph could both “resurrect the mind of the person whose remains lie a few feet below” and allow the “writers of epitaphs [to] speak in their own voices.”
To the “cottage girl” of Wordsworth’s “We Are Seven,” there is no distinction between her dead siblings and her living ones. She knits her stockings, eats her supper, and plays her games in the churchyard where her brother and sister are buried, and stubbornly considers the deceased to be active members of the family:
“But they are dead; those two are dead!
Their spirits are in heaven!”
“Twas throwing words away; for still The little Maid would have her will, And said, “Nay, we are seven!”
To Dickinson, the problem with the romantic view of childhood was its naiveté. It was not possible, she held as an adult, to recapture the winsome innocence of those early years. If childhood spoke at all to the adult, it did so in a language that he or she could no longer take refuge in:
The Child’s faith is new
Whole – like His Principle –
Wide – like the Sunrise
On fresh Eyes –
Never had a Doubt –
Laughs — at a scruple —
Believes all sham
But Paradise —
Credits the World –
Deems His Dominion
Broadest of Sovereignties —
And Caesar – mean —
In the Comparison –
Baseless Emperor—
Ruler of nought,
Yet swaying all –
Grown bye and bye
To hold mistaken
His pretty estimates
Of Prickly Things
He gains the skill
Sorrowful – as certain —
Men – to anticipate
Instead of Kings – [#701]
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Dickinson’s treatment of childhood, of her own in particular and of the phenomenon in general, is but one of many signs of her uneasiness with romantic assumptions about the innocent power of the self. For the whole of her adult life, she was torn between her romantic aspirations and her realistic apprehensions. She yearned to share the faith that Wordsworth, Emerson, and Thoreau had in the unaided human consciousness, but her sense of human limitation would not let her do so. As Albert Gelpi argues, Dickinson’s “peculiar burden was to be a Romantic poet with a Calvinist’s sense of things; to know transitory ecstasy in a world tragically fallen and doomed.”
Like the romantic poets and philosophers, Dickinson considered the central human dilemma to be a problem of knowledge rather than a matter of the will. That is, she came to regard ignorance as a greater problem than sin and held out more hope for the change of perception than for the transformation of the will.
But at the same time, Dickinson could not accept the romantics’ optimism about the self. Apprehending the limits of memory and death, she knew that though it was a joy to “anticipate kings,” those kings never arrived. By the time she became a young adult, she had learned too well the lessons of the “skill sorrowful.”
“But it is my nature always to anticipate more than I realize,” she wrote of herself at fifteen. As she matured, young Emily Dickinson would learn repeatedly how bitingly true this self-assessment was.
LEARNING THE WAYS OF DISENCHANTMENT
Death was to serve as one of Emily Dickinson’s earliest and most effective teachers, drilling its lessons home even in her adolescence.
In the mid-nineteenth century, the life expectancy of a newborn child was little more than half what it is today. In that era before antibiotics and modern surgical procedures, young children were especially vulnerable, and it was a rare young adult who had not lost at least several beloved friends or family members. And when death struck, it did not visit in the distant sterility of a hospital but invaded the intimacy of the home.
For a young girl coming of age in mid-nineteenth-century New England, there were many opportunities to be trained in “The Science of the Grave” that “No Man can understand” [#659].
In the nineteenth century, it was the custom for family members or friends to keep a “watch” at the bedside of a gravely ill person. New Englanders had long been schooled in the ars moriendi, the “art of dying” from which the living were meant to draw lasting lessons of faith.
One of Emily Dickinson’s closest friends (and future sister-in-law), Susan Gilbert, kept two such vigils and later referred to them as “the most terrifying nights of her life.”
When she was thirteen, Emily herself watched as the health of her friend Sophia Holland failed. “I visited her often in sickness & watched over her bed,” she recalled two years later.
When Sophia lost consciousness — “at length Reason fled” – her doctor would not let anyone enter her room. Emily was determined, however, to see her friend again, and eventually was permitted “to look at her a moment through the open door. I took off my shoes and stole softly to the sick room.”
“There she lay mild & beautiful. … I looked as long as friends would permit,” Dickinson explained. She did not shed a tear when Sophia died, “for my heart was too full to weep, but after she was laid in her coffin & I felt I could not call her back again I gave way to a fixed melancholy.” Emily “told no one the cause of my grief, though it was gnawing at my very heart strings.” Having kept the secret of her sadness from her family, she suffered in solitude. Her melancholy eventually proved so strong that her parents sent her to stay with her aunt Lavinia Norcross in Boston for the better part of a month.
Death had been something of a regular presence for young Emily since 1840, when her family moved from the Homestead on Main Street to a newly purchased dwelling less than a mile away. This house bordered on the Amherst cemetery, and from its windows the adolescent Emily watched a steady stream of mourners pass by. “I have just seen a funeral procession go by,” she wrote at fifteen to her friend Abiah Root, “so if my ideas are rather dark you need not marvel.” The darkness of the mood quickly gave way to playfulness, as the cemetery procession made Emily dream of deathlessness: “I have lately come to the conclusion that I am Eve, alias Mrs. Adam. You know there is no account of her death in the Bible, and why am not I Eve?” Yet only weeks later, Emily was back at it again, writing Abiah another long letter whose major theme was death. As she mused on death and everlasting life, she told Abiah that “yesterday as I sat by the north window the funeral train entered the open gate of the church yard, following the remains of Judge Dickinson’s wife to her long home.”
In fixing her attention upon death as she did, the adolescent Emily Dickinson was following the ghoulish fashion of her day. What Ann Douglass has called “the domestication of death” progressed at a rapid pace in the decades leading up to the Civil War. Instead of the stoic, sober acceptance of death that had been the norm in the Puritan past, there was in mid-nineteenth-century America a concerted effort to drain it of its terror by denying its power.
Puritan attitudes toward death had been driven by the fear of hell and the hope of heaven; death was accepted as a hard reality to be overcome only through the power of God to raise the dead. In Dickinson’s lifetime, efforts focused instead on smothering the sting of death with sentimental pieties.
In the years that she was growing to maturity, there developed an elaborate body of the literature of consolation as well as a new set of therapeutic attitudes toward death, burial, and the afterlife. Emily Dickinson grew up in a culture in which, in the words of one observer, “dying was a way of being ‘born to the purple,’ a coronation as much as a crucifixion.”
Dickinson appropriated the new sentimental customs of her day up to a point. When she was fifteen, she made a pilgrimage to Mt. Auburn cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, while visiting her aunt and uncle.
Officially opened in 1831, Mt. Auburn was the first of many rural cemeteries in America. Up to that time, the local churchyard had served as the burial ground for each community, but the opening of Mt. Auburn marked a dramatic shift in burial practices and mourning rituals. The purpose of the rural cemetery was to blur distinctions between death and life. The bucolic settings of these cemeteries, complete with winding paths, gentle slopes, and the profusion of graveside flowers, were meant to reassure the living about the sweet comforts of the dead.
Theodore Cuyler, a prominent New York minister, wrote of visiting the grave of his son in Greenwood cemetery: “The air was as silent as the unnumbered sleepers around me; and turning toward the sacred spot where my precious dead was lying, I bade him, as of old, ‘Goodnight!’” It was as though his son had simply gone to a summer camp or boarding school, for the cemetery was “simply a vast and exquisitely beautiful dormitory.”
Having visited Mt. Auburn in the summer of 1846, Dickinson wrote enthusiastically to Abiah Root about the experience. She called Mt. Auburn the “City of the Dead” and was struck by the fitting beauty of the place. “It seems as if Nature had formed the spot with a distinct idea in view of its being a resting place for her children,” she explained, making curious use of the argument from design to explain the comfort she derived from the cemetery.
In this garden, the “wearied & disappointed” dead can “stretch themselves beneath the spreading cypress & close their eyes ‘calmly as to a nights repose or flowers at set of sun.”
Death as a painless slumber or the setting sun – these are standard images of the literature of consolation and domesticated death.
Yet in the same letter, Dickinson showed how she had already gone beyond the sentimental limits of her day. Near the letter’s close, her thoughts about the passing of the seasons led Dickinson to paraphrase several lines from Night Thoughts, by the eighteenth-century English poet Edward Young. “We take no note of Time but from its loss,” she wrote to Abiah Root. “Pay no moment but in just purchase of it’s worth & what it’s worth, ask death beds. They can tell. Part with it as with life reluctantly.” But at this point, instead of resigning herself to mortality and giving up all for Christ, Dickinson stood her ground and told Abiah, “I have not yet made my peace with God. … I feel that the world holds a predominant place in my affections. I do not feel that I could give up all for Christ, were I called to die.” While her culture was increasingly striving to make death seem enchanting, Dickinson found her sense of disenchantment deepening, as she weighed the delights of this world and considered the grave cost of their loss:
Love can do all but raise the Dead
I doubt if even that
From such a giant were withheld
Were flesh equivalent
But love is tired and must sleep,
And hungry and must graze
And so abets the shining Fleet
Till it is out of gaze. [#1758]
Dickinson’s adolescent responses to death — alternating between melancholy disenchantment and angry disbelief – would remain with herthroughout adulthood.
Those early encounters with death contributed to the sense she shared with her Enlightenment and romantic predecessors that finitude rather than sin was the fundamental human dilemma.
For the adult Dickinson, it was not the perversity of the will but the inevitability of death that could make life unbearable and heaven necessary. Without death, earth would have been enough, she thought. “If roses had not faded, and frosts had never come, and one had not fallen here and there whom I could not waken, there were no need of other Heaven than the one below,”
Dickinson wrote to a friend in 1856, “and if God had been here this summer, and seen the things that I have seen — I guess that He would think His Paradise superfluous.” Were it not for death, the world might remain enchanted and God himself become a relic.
Like her views on childhood, Dickinson’s understanding of death marked her as a true product of modernity.
In The Nature and Destiny of Man, Reinhold Niebuhr notes that with the Renaissance, first, and then the Enlightenment, the revival of ancient Greek ideas led to a significant change in Western beliefs about evil and death. At their center, both Enlightenment rationalism and romantic intuitionism represented modern variations upon ancient Greek beliefs that “consider man’s involvement in nature as the very cause of evil, and define the ultimate redemption of life as emancipation from finiteness.”
As Emil Brunner explains, the Christian faith historically has consistently posited “a clear relation between sin and death. The wages of sin is death’” (Romans 6:23).
Dickinson never accepted that connection. It simply did not make sense to her: “Whom he loveth, he punisheth,’ is a doubtful solace finding tart response in the lower Mind.” And because she rejected the tie between sin and death, Dickinson was to find it difficult to see the connection between suffering and truth.
The fact of suffering she knew all too well; the truth to which it pointed, however, remained hidden:
Of God we ask one favor, that we may be forgiven –
For what, he is presumed to know — The Crime, from us, is hidden —
Immured the whole of Life
Within a magic Prison
We reprimand the Happiness
That too competes with Heaven – [#1675]
It was not only a preoccupation with mortality and the fading of life’s splendor that led to the disenchantment of the young Emily Dickinson; her formal education also played a crucial role in teaching her “Men — to anticipate/Instead of Kings —” From that education she acquired a keen sensitivity to science and a deep interest in languages and literature.
In her eight years of formal schooling at the Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, Dickinson developed her extraordinary intellectual powers and sharpened her awareness of the limits set to those powers by nature and the social order she inhabited. The formal training ended when Emily was only seventeen, after her first year at Mount Holyoke, but its influence can be traced throughout her poetic career.
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