{"id":10635,"date":"2025-05-06T16:10:49","date_gmt":"2025-05-06T20:10:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/the-alchemy-of-unrequited-love-and-the-story-behind-emily-dickinsons-most-famous-poem-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2025-05-06T16:10:49","modified_gmt":"2025-05-06T20:10:49","slug":"the-alchemy-of-unrequited-love-and-the-story-behind-emily-dickinsons-most-famous-poem-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/the-alchemy-of-unrequited-love-and-the-story-behind-emily-dickinsons-most-famous-poem-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"The Alchemy of Unrequited Love and the Story Behind Emily Dickinson\u2019s Most Famous Poem \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
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This essay is adapted from the nineteenth chapter of my book Figuring<\/a>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/a>In the first autumn of her thirties, Emily Dickinson wrote to her confidante and eventual editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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I had a terror \u2014 since September \u2014 I could tell to none, and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground \u2014 because I am afraid.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Not a \u201cfright,\u201d not a \u201cshock,\u201d but a terror<\/em>. What lay behind this enormity implied by a woman who measured her words so meticulously? Generations of biographers have filled pages with conjectures of varying persuasiveness \u2014 a death, some unrecorded heartbreak in her volcanic relationship with Susan<\/a>, the first attack of epilepsy \u2014 but the most intriguing theory came nearly a century after the poet encrypted these words.<\/p>\n

In 1951, after years of research and travel to various archives, the scholar Rebecca Patterson proposed a wholly novel candidate for the \u201cterror\u201d of 1861: Kate Scott Anthon \u2014 a newly widowed young woman Susan had befriended during their studies at the Utica Female Academy and then introduced to Emily, who fell into an intense romantic and possibly physical affair with the enticing newcomer before Kate severed the relationship without explanation, dealing a blow Emily would experience as deathly and furnishing the raw material for much of her mournful poetry. <\/p>\n

Their story is a mosaic assembled from various surviving documents, as direct as Emily\u2019s letters and as oblique as the marginalia in Kate\u2019s favorite books.<\/p>\n

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Unauthenticated daguerreotype of (most scholars believe) Emily Dickinson and Kate Scott Anthon<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the late winter of 1859, Kate descended a sleigh in her fashionable black hat and widow\u2019s veil in front of her former classmate\u2019s home in Amherst. Almost immediately, Susan introduced her to the beloved auburn-haired friend who lived across the hedge in the brick house painted deep red and who had been hearing of her for nearly a decade. When Emily, wrapped in a merino shawl, met the tall, handsome woman with the penetrating dark eyes, musical voice, and lively passion for literature and astronomy, she was instantly entranced.<\/p>\n

During the three weeks of Kate\u2019s first stay in Amherst, the two women, both twenty-eight, became inseparable. They took long walks with Emily\u2019s dog, Carlo, read Aurora Leigh<\/em><\/a> aloud to each other, and spent evenings at the piano as Emily improvised \u2014 \u201cweird and beautiful melodies, all from her own inspiration,\u201d Kate would remember. As Emily played, Kate towered behind her \u2014 \u201cGoliath,\u201d the petite poet would call her. <\/p>\n

When Kate left to go home, Emily beckoned her for another visit to Amherst:<\/p>\n

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I am pleasantly located in the deep sea, but love will row you out, if her hands are strong, and don\u2019t wait till I land, for I\u2019m going ashore on the other side.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/a>
Art by Giuliano Cucco from Before I Grew Up<\/em><\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Emily\u2019s early letters to Kate pulsate with electricity. Writing weeks after they first met, she tries to disguise with playfulness the push-and-pull of irrepressible, frustrated longing in the code language of botany that was her first poetic tongue<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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I never missed a Kate before. . . . Sweet at my door this March night another Candidate \u2014 Go Home! We don\u2019t like Katies here! \u2014 Stay! My heart votes for you, and what am I indeed to dispute her ballot \u2013? What are your qualifications? Dare you dwell in the East where we dwell? Are you afraid of the Sun? \u2014 When you hear the new violet sucking her way among the sods, shall you be resolute?\u2026 Will you still come?\u2026 Kate gathered in March! It is a small bouquet, dear \u2014 but what it lacks in size, it gains in fadelessness, \u2014 Many can boast a hollyhock, but few can bear a rose! \u2026 So I rise, wearing her \u2014 so I sleep, holding, \u2014 Sleep at last with her fast in my hand and wake bearing my flower. \u2014 <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/a>
Page from Emily Dickinson\u2019s herbarium<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the late winter of 1860, they spent a night together in Emily\u2019s bedroom \u2014 unrecorded, inarticulable, except perhaps in verse: <\/p>\n

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Her sweet Weight on my Heart a Night
Had scarcely deigned to lie \u2014
When, stirring, for Belief\u2019s delight,
My Bride had slipped away \u2014<\/p>\n

If \u2019twas a Dream \u2014 made solid \u2014 just
The Heaven to confirm \u2014
Or if Myself were dreamed of Her \u2014
The power to presume \u2014 <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Several weeks after that momentous night, Emily would channel this precious perishability in a letter to Kate:<\/p>\n

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Finding is slow, facilities for losing so frequent, in a world like this, I hold with extreme caution. A prudence so astute may seem unnecessary, but plenty moves those most, dear, who have been in want\u2026 Were you ever poor? I have<\/em> been a Beggar.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Whatever took place between them, they never addressed it overtly \u2014 it is always impossible to articulate the possibility between two people, but especially in a time and place that confined the possible to such narrow parameters for permissible love. Feeling the impossibility of it all, Emily shuddered with anticipatory loss:<\/p>\n

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Kate, Distinctly sweet your face stands in its phantom niche \u2014 I touch your hand \u2014 my cheek your cheek \u2014 I stroke your vanished hair, Why did you enter, sister, since you must depart? Had not its heart been torn enough but you must send your shred?\u2026 There is a subject, dear, on which we never touch.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Little is known of Kate\u2019s side of the experience. None of her letters to Emily survive. (The poet had instructed her sister that all letters be burned after her death \u2014 a request which Lavinia Dickinson promptly obliged before discovering the trove of poems that made her realize her sister\u2019s correspondence might have immense literary value.) But Kate \u2014 who signed many of her surviving letters to other correspondents \u201cThomas\u201d or \u201cTommy\u201d \u2014 did have an unambiguous and lifelong proclivity for romantic attachment to women, culminating later in life with a longtime relationship with a young Englishwoman. <\/p>\n

Perhaps at twenty-eight, she was simply not ready to so radically dismantle the superstructure of her life as she knew it. In April 1861, she severed the relationship with Emily. There is no record of what was said, but the devastation was complete and lifelong. Many years later, Emily would write to Higginson:<\/p>\n

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If ever you lost a friend\u2026 you remember you could not begin again because there was no world \u2014<\/p>\n

A breathless Death is not so cold as a Death that breathes.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/a>
Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days<\/a><\/em>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the immediacy of the loss, she interpolated between hope and despair, as we all do when discomposed by a sudden abandonment. A month after her \u201cterror,\u201d which might just be her painful acceptance that Kate was gone, her friend Samuel Bowles \u2014 whose newspaper had printed one of the only four poems published in her lifetime \u2014 came to Amherst. She refused to see him. Most of her letters from that period were burned, but Samuel was one of her most intimate friends \u2014 it is likely that she had confided in him the intensity of her heartbreak, if not its source. \u201cWe tell a Hurt to cool it,\u201d she would write in a poem. Among his own letters is one from that summer to a recipient whose name has been scrubbed \u2014 an extraordinary letter of consolation to somebody anguishing with unrequited love, somebody who may well have been Emily:<\/p>\n

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My dear \u2014 :<\/p>\n

\u2026 You must give if you expect to receive \u2014 give happiness, friendship, love, joy, and you will find them floating back to you. Sometimes you will give more than you receive. We all do that in some of our relations, but it is as true a pleasure often to give without return as life can afford us. We must not make bargains with the heart, as we would with the butcher for his meat. Our business is to give what we have to give \u2014 what we can get to give. The return we have nothing to do with\u2026 One will not give us what we give them \u2014 others will more than we can or do give them \u2014 and so the accounts will balance themselves. It is so with my loves and friendships \u2014 it is so with everybody\u2019s.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Emily was not ready to let go of the love she had given, of the hope that it might one day be returned, though alchemised and transmuted into a different form. She wrote to Kate plaintively:<\/p>\n

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How many years, I wonder, will sow the moss upon them, before we bind again, a little altered, it may be, elder a little it will<\/em> be, and yet the same, as suns which shine between our lives and loss, and violets.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That season, she composed her most famous poem \u2014 read here by twenty-first-century children who are yet to have their loves and losses, and animated by artist Olga Ptashnik:<\/p>\n