Dear Master

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

When Emily Dickinson died, in eighteen eighty-six, she left behind a great many secrets. Three of them were letters. Drafts, really. No envelope. No name. Only a title. Master.

They’re not polite letters. In one, calling herself Daisy, she writes: If you saw a bullet hit a Bird, and he told you he wasn’t shot, you might weep at his courtesy, but you would certainly doubt his word.

And: I’ve got a Tomahawk in my side, but that doesn’t hurt me much. Her master stabs her more.

And then the line that sends biographers reaching for the magnifying glass. If I had the Beard on my cheek, like you, and you had Daisy’s petals, and you cared so for me, what would become of you?

So. A man. With a beard.

And here we leave the evidence behind, because nobody knows who he was. The favourite suspects are Samuel Bowles, the charming and very married editor of the Springfield Republican, and the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, a married Philadelphia preacher she’s thought to have heard in eighteen fifty-five. Others have nominated a judge, a college friend of her brother’s, her sister-in-law Susan, and even God. Nobody can prove a single one. Nobody even knows if the letters were sent.

What survives is a woman writing: I want to see you more, Sir, than all I wish for in this world.

Wild nights, she wrote. Wild nights. Were I with thee. And a century and a half later, we still don’t know who thee was.