The Colonel Who Needed a Lie-Down

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

A war hero goes to meet a woman who hardly leaves the house. Guess which one needs a lie-down afterwards.

August, eighteen seventy. Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson — who’d led one of the first Union regiments of formerly enslaved men — finally visits Emily Dickinson in Amherst, after eight years of letters.

He wrote to his wife that same day. She came in with two day lilies, put them into his hand, and said: These are my introduction. Then, under her breath: Forgive me if I am frightened; I never see strangers, and hardly know what I say.

Then she talked. Continuously, he said. She gave him her test for poetry: If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. And she asked him: How do most people live without any thoughts?

Next day he wrote again. I never was with any one who drained my nerve power so much. Without touching her, she drew from me. I am glad not to live near her.

Now for the gossip. Three years later, writing to his sisters about Dickinson, Higginson quoted a remark of his wife Mary’s that, he said, still held: Oh, why do the insane so cling to you?

And in eighteen seventy-six, in a letter to his sister, he called Dickinson his partially cracked poetess.

Cracked, perhaps. But the colonel had faced Confederate fire. One day with a woman holding two lilies, and he was done in.