Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts on December 10, 1830. She was the second child of Emily Norcross and Edward Dickinson. Her father Edward was a powerful and influential political figure, who, in addition to serving as the treasurer for Amherst College (which had been founded by Emily's grandfather), held positions on the Massachusetts General Court, the Massachusetts State Senate, and the House of Representatives. Although Emily did not enjoy the public life her family had because of their influence and power, she did benefit from her family's money in that it enabled her to attend Amherst Academy and later Mount Holyoke College. She did well at the College, but problems with her health caused her to return to Amherst after only a year there. It was directly after her return from Mount Holyoke that she began to dress exclusively in white and live in almost total seclusion. She could be fun and easygoing with the few people she counted as close friends, but with strangers she was almost painfully shy. It could be partially because of this shyness that she never married, although she had several very close male friends. Two of these friends, Charles Wadsworth and Thomas Wentworth Higgins, had a great deal of influence on her life and writings, and it its these two that are most often suspected of being her lovers, and the subjects of her many love poems.

Emily Dickinson has written hundreds of poems and letters about love, both romantic and erotic, many of them quite explicit, but as far as anyone knows she never physically consummated a relationship, or in fact had a lover at all. Suspicion is rampant that either or both of the two men mentioned above was her lover at one time or another, and that Wadsworth was the subject of many of her poems, and that he was the "Master" that many of her poems are addressed to.

Considering that she probably had very little actual experience with love in its many forms, Dickinson's love poems are remarkably accurate descriptions of the sensations of falling in love, of being in love, of the pain of losing a loved one, of the knowledge of forbidden love. From reading many of her love poems, one almost had the feeling that the poems were written by a nun, one who had taken a vow of seclusion and chastity and then fallen in love, one whose heart is torn by her vows and her love. But in the end, there is no real doubt what her choice will be. She is not willing to give up her life of quiet seclusion for this man, whomever he may be. In her poem I cannot live with you, she speaks of how she has made herself a quiet life, and living with this lover would replace that life. She says she could not bear to die with him, nor to go on living without him. She could not rise with him, "because [his] face/would put out Jesus',/that new grace/.../except that you, than he/shone closer by". Clearly she is unwilling to give up her religion, and this man would replace Jesus for her. The last stanza is perhaps the most poignant and moving of the whole poem. "So we must keep apart,/you there, I here,/with just the door ajar/that oceans are/and prayer,/and that pale sustenance,/despair!". This stanza seems to say that her lover is moving away, and she is convincing both him and herself that she must not follow him. She knows the despair that will engulf her if he leaves, but she know that she must not-cannot-follow. It is interesting that the references to Jesus, Paradise, and Hell should appear in this poem, because Dickinson, who had been raised in her family's strict Puritan tradition, was later on in life quite agnostic. She stopped going to church, and embraced science, often