I am glad there are Books.

For they are better than Heaven,

For that is unavoidable,

While one may miss these.

Prescient words by the 19th-century mystic poet Emily Dickinson — pertinent in our world where the love of books, and poetry in particular, seems to be dying an unavoidable death.

Last summer I visited Dickinson’s family home, now a museum in the college town of Amherst in Massachusetts, about 160 km west of Boston. It’s a charmingly green area with meadows, low rolling hills and unforgettable sunsets. Yasodhara, my Sufism Without Borders friend, who recites Dickinson by heart, is an Amherst resident. She picked me up one afternoon, we drove to Amherst, stopping for lunch at the Black Sheep, a bustling, informal place frequented by college students and located a couple of blocks from Dickinson’s house in Main Street.

The café was crowded so we walked to the park across the street with our mozzarella cheese and sun-dried tomato baguettes drenched in tangy Italian dressing and large glasses of iced tea to beat the heat. And the final touch of decadence — a blackberry-studded custard tart. We sat close to the metal statues of Dickinson and Robert Frost. The two poets are seated on boulders facing each other, as if in conversation .

After lunch, we walked the two blocks to the Homestead, Dickinson’s family home. She was born here and spent most of her short life (1830-1886) in this house. We were walking the very street she had walked more than a century ago. I was like a little girl receiving a longed-for gift, so joyous was this thought of walking her street, visiting her home. The Homestead is a handsome, two-storey house with dark green shutters.

The tour was about to begin. A group of us was taken through the parlour and the library where Dickinson received guests, as well as the adjoining conservatory built by her father to house the poet’s exotic plants. Portraits of the Dickinson family members were on the walls. Finally we trooped upstairs to her bedroom, with our guide, Shiela. “That’s the desk where Emily wrote,” she said. A small, prim table was placed by the window, looking out onto Main Street. Is this where she sat and observed the sky, watched the people passing by? A reverential hush fell over the group. We were standing in the room of one of the world’s greatest poets. Her narrow bed and the wicker basket in which she lowered treats for street children took on a sacred significance. Photography is prohibited or I would have saved an image of her austere, white, cotton dress hanging in a glass cabinet outside her room. I imagined her in this modest white dress with a bluish shawl draped over her shoulders, agreeing to meet only a few select visitors. Dickinson was a hermit by choice, a master wordsmith content to spend time with her family and her unusual imagination. She was the baker in the family, scribbling bits of poems as they arrived, oftentimes on the backs of cocoa powder wrappers.

Words might have arrived in a torrent but she picked them with agonising effort. In one of her poems (number 1469 in the Franklin edition), she crossed out several word choices such as ‘lonesome’ and ‘warning’ before settling for ‘chilly’ in the opening line: “A chilly Peace infests the Grass.” And the same process was perhaps painstakingly repeated with each poem. Only about 10 of her 1,800 poems were published in her lifetime and that too anonymously, perhaps without her knowledge. She shared her poems only with friends and family, gifting many of them to her sister-in-law Susan, her close friend. It was only after her death that a large collection of her poems were discovered, neatly tied in bundles.

Did Dickinson make peace with the fact that women of her time could not claim the public sphere? Or did she shun fame and worldly recognition because it threatened her reclusive, solitude-loving imagination? She was a recluse, no doubt, but not a timid one. Her boldness comes across in her writing. There’s a self-assuredness about shirking fame. In her verse, she mocks conventionality through the use of unusual syntax and even in her deliberate use of capital letters and dashes:

I’m Nobody! Who are you?

Are you - Nobody - too?

Then there’s a pair of us!

Don’t tell! They’d advertise - you know!

How dreary - to be - Somebody!

How public - like a Frog -

To tell one’s name - the livelong June -

To an admiring Bog!

And yet, the poet, who preferred to be a nobody, was bold and opinionated even though she was deprived of a college education. Fowler Dickinson, her grandfather, was one of the founders of Amherst College but she could not attend this all-male college. She attended school and was mostly self-taught. Whatever formal education she received was somewhat unusual for women of her time. She attended the nearby Mount Holyoke Seminary for girls but returned to her father’s house after a year. Her poor health was always a cause for concern, but more likely she felt oppressed by the seminary’s emphasis on moral and religious education. The young women at the seminary were divided into three groups: those who professed their faith, the hopefuls, and the hopeless. Dickinson was assigned to the hopeless group and her status remained unchanged at the time of leaving.

After the Homestead tour ended, we walked around the grounds of the museum, admiring the summer flowers in bloom. Yasodhara offered to take me to the cemetery where Dickinson is buried. In Amherst, she is thought of as the patron saint of writers. People bring her things she used to love — feathers and flowers, rocks, bits of paper, pencils; and leave it on her gravestone. I stood by Dickinson’s grave and prayed to her spirit for guidance in a confusing world, for I have never felt more in need of her kind of boldness, the quiet certitude with which she took on the world. I felt she was around, I knew she was listening and perhaps watching us with her widely-spaced otherworldly eyes. I placed by her grave a small bunch of white flowers that I had plucked from a bush in the park, by her grave.

When women didn’t feel they could make it as writers in men’s world, were they paradoxically better off? Because they wrote as nobodys, were they in some sense freer to write what they wanted to write? With no looming fear of failure or thwarted ambition or hunger for public recognition, could women explore more? Now that the playing field appears even, and women can write and get published almost as easily as men, are women writers in more of a bind? Our creativity, the wild untameable impulse, is hemmed by the doubts and demands of the literary marketplace: how to, who for, what for?

Standing beside her grave, I thanked Dickinson for her adamant spirit. To visit her verse is to set aside expectations of arriving at a single meaning. Multiple meanings and musings and intimations and a rustling in some corner of consciousness is what you receive. My innermost self receives all this and more from her. Long after the visit to her home and resting place, she inspires me to stand adamantly. She keeps pouring soft refrains into my lap:

But when the south wind stirs

the pools

And struggles in the lanes,

Her heart misgives her for her vow,

And she pours soft refrains

Into the lap of adamant,

And spices, and the dew,

That stiffens quietly to quartz,

Upon her amber shoe.

Nighat Gandhi is the author of Ghalib at Dusk and Other Stories

Related Topics