In Memory Of Emily

Emily Dickinson
December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886

'T was just this time last year I died.
I know I heard the corn,
When I was carried by the farms,--
It had the tassels on.

I thought how yellow it would look
When Richard went to mill;
And then I wanted to get out,
But something held my will.

I thought just how red apples wedged
The stubble's joints between;
And carts went stooping round the fields
To take the pumpkins in.

I wondered which would miss me least,
And when Thanksgiving came,
If father'd multiply the plates
To make an even sum.

And if my stocking hung too high,
Would it blur the Christmas glee,
That not a Santa Claus could reach
The altitude of me?

But this sort grieved myself, and so
I thought how it would be
When just this time, some perfect year,
Themselves should come to me.

…and yet she died in the season she didn’t list in the above poem. Spring. Today is the anniversary of Emily Dickinson’s death in 1886. On May 15, 1886 Emily Dickinson died at the age of 55. Her brother Austin wrote in his diary that "...the day was awful ... she ceased to breathe that terrible breathing just before the whistle sounded for six."

She could see West Cemetery from her window in that room she never left. The funeral was held in the library of her family home. The service was short. A favorite poem by Emily Bronte, “No Coward Soul of Mine,” was read, and Emily’s coffin was carried out the back door and across a field of buttercups, where she was buried, laid in a white coffin with vanilla scented Lady’s Slipper heliotrope (a popular Victorian flower) and “a knot of blue field violets placed about it.” There she lies in the family plot on Triangle Street in Amherst, Massachusetts.

In the poem above, she speculates if her father would still lay out her plate at Thanksgiving, or just how she would be missed within her small social circle, but still her place in the world. I know she has haunted me for years, and I’m not sure “haunted” is the right word, but I have definitely felt an “affinity,” which seems a more appropriate and Emily-like word. I searched her poems, and apparently she never used it. She should have. I'll use it for her:

A field of yellow
Under coffin white
Petaled in varied purple hue
Lady’s slipper in wooded shade
With shy faced violets, too
Blooms that shrink
From sun of day
Have been my affinity
Now see me on my way