Volume_29_Issue_3

T he previous two Words of the War columns featured Union Lt. Joshua L. Chamberlain and famous American poet and Civil War nurse, Walt Whitman. Both gentlemen immersed themselves directly into the heart of the war—Chamberlain in combat and Whitman in care—and these experiences are clearly expressed in their wartime writings. Emily Dickinson’s confrontation with the war is profoundly more internal. At a young age, Dickinson was overcome with a paralyzing fear of death—especially the sudden death of those close to her. This fear was sadly realized when her close friend and second cousin, Sophia Holland, died when Dickinson was in her early teens. Dickinson was so distraught over the loss, that her parents sent her away from their Amherst home to extended family in Boston to recover. This fear is arguably contributory to Dickinson’s life of seclusion. She rarely left her father’s homestead in adulthood, corresponding to friends, family members, and mentors through letters and poems. Like Whitman, Dickinson’s poetic style strayed from tradition. She chose unconventional capitalization, broken rhyme, and obscure use of dashes throughout most of her works. Because of this, the limited amount of her work that was published during her lifetime was highly edited. Fortunately, her younger sister, Lavinia, uncovered about 40 handbound volumes of poetry and enlisted help from family friends to edit and compile them into the collections that are famous today. Due to her isolation, she wasn’t as directly immersed in the war as some of her contemporaries, but her writings reflect her internal conflict with the high cost of victory and the price it pays on those living through and after it. Despite being a lifelong resident of Massachusetts, she never claims Union pride nor affirms or dismisses the Southern cause in her work. Instead, she uses her pen as a tool to dissect the metaphysical and theodicean complexities of the war. As Shira Wolosky depicts in her book Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War , “Unlike other northern writers, Dickinson does not address the specific issues of slavery or of union involved in war’s politics … political causes are secondary to the metaphysical constructions they imply. For her, the war is war as such. What concerns her are the metaphysical issues raised by the war and implicit in its theological rhetoric.” To Dickinson, war was murder and killings were senseless. Dickinson struggled with the widely adopted notion of the time that the Civil War was rooted in God’s will or that the sacrifice and suffering that came with it were rewarded by a greater good or higher calling. She struggled internally with conceptualizing it all as it is reflected in her 1862 poem, Victory comes late— And is help low to freezing lips— To take it— How sweet it would have tasted— Just a Drop— Was God so economical? His Table’s spread too high for Us— Unless We dine on tiptoe— Crumbs—fit such little mouths— Cherries—suit Robins— The Eagle’s Golden Breakfast strangles—Them— God keep His Oath to Sparrows— Who of little Love—know how to starve— As the war progressed, Dickinson tried to make sense of it and of her conflicting feelings around life’s varying parallels. Good vs. evil, life and death, God vs. the devil, war and peace, and victory over defeat are weighted and debated throughout her works, My Triumph lasted till the Drums Had left the Dead alone And then I dropped my Victory And chastened stole along To where the finished Faces Conclusion turned on me And then I hated Glory And wished myself were They. What is to be is best descried When it has also been — Could Prospect taste of Retrospect The tyrannies of Men Were Tenderer — diviner The Transitive toward. A Bayonet's contrition Is nothing to the Dead. The war didn’t provide Dickinson with any type of closure but instead fed into her internal confusion and conflict with the physical and metaphysical world around her. Today, her poetry provokes conversation, contemplation, and debate about issues that still matter to, and are often questioned by, citizens everywhere. Sources Wolosky, Emily. (1984) Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War . New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Preservation & Progress Volume 29, Issue 3 17