Emily wrote a letter about her nephew Gilbert to his mother just after he died which I think is a masterpiece. He was eight years old when he died of typhoid fever. He had lived next door to her in Amherst, Massachusetts, and she appreciated him, and his mother, Susan Gilbert Dickinson, to whom she wrote:
Dear Sue -
The Vision of Immortal Life has been fulfilled -
How simply at the last the Fathom comes! The Passenger and not the Sea, we find surprises us -
Gilbert rejoiced in secrets -
His life was panting with them – With what menace of Light he cried “Don’t tell, Aunt Emily”! Now my ascended Playmate must instruct me. Show us, prattling Preceptor, but the way to thee!
He knew no niggard moment – His Life was full of boon – The playthings of the Dervish were not so wild as his -
No crescent was this Creature – He traveled from the Full -
Such soar never set -
I see him in the Star, and meet his sweet velocity in everything that flies – His Life was like the Bugle, which winds itself away, his Elegy an echo – His Requiem ecstasy -
Dawn and Meridian in one.
Wherefore would he wait, wronged only of Night, which he left for us -
Without a speculation, our little Ajax spans the whole -
Pass to thy Rendevous of Light,
Pangless except for us -
Who slowly ford the Mystery
Which thou hast leaped across!
Emily
This letter has been in my mind for forty years and has given me endless confirmation. She sees what I see, and articulates it. She writes a little more about him to his mother in a later letter:
...”Open the Door, open the Door, they are waiting for me,” was Gilbert’s sweet command in delirium. Who were waiting for him, all we possess we would give to know – Anguish at last opened it, and he ran to the little Grave at his Grandparents’ feet – All this and more, though is there more? More than Love and Death? Then tell me its name!”
I extract those words from Johnson’s 1986 book, Emily Dickinson Selected Letters.
There is a poem from an even more remote source which brings Emily’s letter to Gilbert’s mother into more light. I find it in Poems by E. Lenore Brown, published in 1971 by Highway Bookshop, Cobalt, Ontario, but I can find no information online or anywhere else about E. Lenore Brown. She writes about the recent death of her fifteen year old son:
GRAVE ON THE HILLSIDE
There’s a little grave on the green hillside,
Where lies my little son.
There I climbed to-day, with an aching heart,
When the work for the day was done.
While lingering there as the twilight fell,
It seemed I could hear him ask,
“who helps you mother since I am gone?
Who is doing each small task?”
This mother than writes seven stanzas which I omit here in which she expresses ways in which she misses her boy, ending with the tenth stanza as follows:
“Dear boy, no one can ever fill your place
At home, at school, at play.
We miss you more and more each day
Than when you went away.”
Modern professional literary criticism might look down on this kind of thing. But I have some acquaintance with Cobalt and of how hard life was there for a mother during that era.
I was going to contrast the tone of this with Emily’s, but no. Both
are beyond all that.
