| September 15, 2020
Consider the Lilies
I have been reading Marta McDowell’s Emily Dickinson’s Gardening Life, published last year by Timber Press. It was first published in 2005 by McGraw Hill as Emily Dickinson’s Gardens: A Celebration of a Poet and Gardener. Its reprinting suggests the considerable interest both Dickinson and gardens generate today.
I first encountered Emily Dickinson in a course I took in college on American literature. Taught by a man who was a poet of some repute himself but also a bit of a patriarch, the course gave me the following information: 1) Dickinson was queer, definitely not normal; 2) she was queer because she fell in love with a man who was either unavailable or who rejected her; 3) therefore she wrote poetry to compensate; 4) the poetry was pretty good. Finding “the Man” who was the cause of the poetry occupied Dickinson scholars. He has not yet been found.
Even then, I wondered about this analysis, especially as I read the lines: “A loss of something ever felt I/ The first that I could recollect/ Bereft I was–of what I knew not”. This suggested an earlier, deeper grief than thwarted love.
A decade later, as a feminist critic, I returned to these lines and read in them Dickinson’s understanding of her position as a woman in patriarchal culture, trapped in her father’s house. She showed that she understood her position by literally refusing to leave the house (why pretend to be free?), and she resisted her definition as a minor by writing poems now acknowledged to be among the greatest in the English language.
Still later, as an openly gay academic, I included Dickinson in the course I called “Where’s Waldo.” There have always been women attracted to women (Waldo is always there), but in cultures such as 19th century America where open expression of this attraction was prohibited we might need to work through a lot of code to find Waldo (Waldo is hidden in the crowd). Once we found Waldo, though, we might be inclined to say, “Good heavens, it was right in front of our noses, how could we have missed it. Of course I see the red-striped shirt.”
At that time it seemed obvious to me that Dickinson was in love with Susan Gilbert, a woman she met in the summer of 1850 when Dickinson was just 20. It also seemed obvious to me that Sue’s decision to marry Dickinson’s brother (they were married in 1856) created the conditions that produced Dickinson’s psychic breakdown of the later 1850’s: “I felt a funeral in my brain”. Dickinson recovered from this trauma, made certain decisions about how she would proceed to live, and continued to love Sue who became the co-creator of her poetry. Dickinson once wrote, “Where my Hands are cut, her fingers will be found inside”.
Then I thought Waldo couldn’t have been more obvious. Now what seems obvious to me is that Dickinson was far more complex than any single theory can accommodate, even mine, and that our knowledge of her human passions is speculative at best.
So it is a joy to read McDowell’s book and find documentation of a love affair I can be certain of and one that I know I share with Dickinson. Dickinson was passionate about plants. She wrote of this relationship in her poetry and letters. It lasted her entire life. McDowell packs her book with the many references Dickinson made to her gardening life and in the process lets us glimpse a far more delightful Dickinson than the one I encountered so long ago in college.
Dickinson had an acute sense of humor. Her struggles with the religious system of her time is legendary; her sense of humor is not. McDowell quotes from a late letter: “the only Commandment I ever obeyed – ‘Consider the Lilies.’”
I am adopting her pronouncement for my own, as I too engage the theological implications of my plants. However, I can no longer follow her literally in considering the lilies for my asiatics have all fallen victim to the red lily beetle, a nasty creature that eats the leaves, stems, buds and flowers of the lily and in a matter of moments can turn a vibrant plant into a stick of rotting mush. I have had to dig up all my ‘Stargazer,’ the lily with extraordinary pink blooms, fringed with white and dotted with orangey-red spots on the petals; and even the ‘Viva La Vida’ and the ‘African Queen,’ one a bright yellow with a red tongue down the middle of every petal, the other a true orange beauty.
As wordsmith, Dickinson has no equal. In a recent class on pollinators I learned that the ubiquitous red clover, which I have always let grow in my lawn unharmed, provides excellent food for a variety of bees. Dickinson noted this phenomenon and wrote a poem in honor of what she called “the Purple Democrat.” This perfect sobriquet inspires me to consider the clover as well as the lilies.
Some readers of my writing about gardens have commented on my apparent disinterest in the vegetable. I might, for instance, casually mention noticing Sara staking up her peas as I make my way to the delphiniums. I might describe, in considerable detail, the beauty of the delphinium, bloom and leaf and stem, but of the peas I would have nothing to say. Dickinson once wrote to her brother that Amos, a hired man, “weeds and hoes and has oversight of all thoughtless vegetables.” She was not a vegetable gardener either. Perhaps she did not feel commanded to consider the carrot.
Many people nowadays do, however, consider the carrot. Horticulturalists, designers, and gardeners are beginning to appreciate the ornamental and aesthetic qualities of the plants we call vegetables, as well as their food value. There is a movement afoot to convince homeowners to turn their front lawns into vegetable gardens. This has the triple function of weaning us away from our reliance on grass to cover ground, of changing our understanding of what constitutes community and good citizenship, and of restoring us to an appropriate appreciation of our dependence on plants for our lives. Excellent goals, but I think we will keep our veggie garden in the back and I will leave consideration of the carrot to Sara.
McDowell notes that Dickinson’s mother grew figs, entering them in the local Cattle Show’s fruit competition and sending a basket on at least one occasion to the local gazette. Growing figs in the northeast is no easy task. I tried once and failed, the first winter killing my specimen. McDowell speculates: “if a garden is a reflection of the gardener, what do fig trees tell of Emily Norcross Dickinson? Perhaps Dickinson’s mother accepted a challenge and savored the curious, the unusual.”
I could speculate further. If Mrs. Dickinson sent figs to a newspaper, she must have wanted her achievement to be noticed since the paper, predictably, remarked on receiving her gift. Perhaps she was proud, perhaps she craved attention. If we cannot answer key questions about the daughter, we know even less about the wife and mother. And of the sister, Lavinia? To her we owe the poetry, as she defied Dickinson’s command to burn all her papers at her death. Extraordinary. But think of what treasures we may have lost to sisters who were more dutiful and burned the papers.
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