A Virgin Recluse, Apparently

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

An editor has a problem.

It’s April, eighteen ninety-one. Thomas Wentworth Higginson is helping to prepare a second book of poems by the late Emily Dickinson — a quiet spinster from Amherst, Massachusetts, who hardly ever left her father’s house.

And then he turns up a poem that begins: Wild nights — wild nights! Twice. With exclamation marks.

So he writes to his co-editor, Mabel Loomis Todd. We still have the letter. “One poem only I dread a little to print — that wonderful Wild Nights — lest the malignant read into it more than that virgin recluse ever dreamed of putting there.”

That virgin recluse. You can almost hear the collar tightening.

He asks whether her sister, Miss Lavinia, has any shrinking about it. And then he talks himself round: “Yet what a loss to omit it! Indeed it is not to be omitted.”

Fair play to him. In it went.

So what might the malignant find? Well. A heart in port. Done with the compass, done with the chart. Rowing in Eden. And a speaker who longs to moor, tonight, in thee.

Who was thee? Ah. That’s a mystery for another night, and nobody has solved it yet.

But here’s the thing about Higginson’s worry. Nobody needed to read anything into it.

It was already there. In her handwriting. With exclamation marks.