A Dog as Large as Myself

A Poetry Tale about Emily Dickinson, told by Hello Doggo.

In the autumn of eighteen forty-nine, Edward Dickinson, a stern Amherst lawyer, bought his eldest daughter a dog. A big one. Very probably a Newfoundland.

Emily named him Carlo, most likely after a dog in Jane Eyre. And for the next sixteen years, Carlo went where she went. The woods. The fields. The long walks round Amherst.

In eighteen sixty-two, the writer Thomas Wentworth Higginson asked her who her companions were. She told him. Hills, sir, and the Sundown, and a Dog large as myself, that my Father bought me. They are better than Beings, she added, because they know, but do not tell.

She was a small woman. He was a very large dog. It was not an exaggeration.

A few months later, she brought him up again. Carlo, she thought, would please Higginson. He was dumb, and brave. High praise, from a poet with no patience for chatter. Her mother, she told her cousins, thought him a model dog.

Then, in January eighteen sixty-six, came a letter to Higginson barely a line long. Carlo died. E. Dickinson. And underneath, a question. Would you instruct me now?

Some biographers think she withdrew further into the house after that. It’s hard to prove; she was already keeping to herself. But, as far as anyone knows, she never had another dog.

Hope, she once wrote, is the thing with feathers. For sixteen years, she had something better. It had fur, and it knew how to keep a secret.