One of the enduring mysteries of American literature is a series of three letters drafted by Emily Dickinson to someone she called “Master.”
There is no evidence that he letters—written between 1858 and 1862 and discovered shortly after Dickinson’s death in 1886—were ever sent, although they may have been drafts of versions that were posted. No one knows to whom they were intended. Perhaps the Reverend Charles Wadsworth (they had a correspondence, none of which survives), or Samuel Bowles, the editor of a newspaper in Springfield and a family friend, or a professor named William Smith Clarke. Or perhaps they are not to a person at all, but to God. Or the Devil. For nearly twenty years I’ve taught Dickinson and the Master Letters in my early American literature course, always hoping to come closer to the source of the mystery. Instead, just the opposite has happened. The mystery has deepened. The more I study them, the more we hash them out in class, the longer the shadows grow and deepen over their meaning.
1. Here is the opening passage and some lines from near the end of the second Master letter, probably from around late 1861 or early 1862. The letter was written in pencil. I’ve indicated Dickinson’s crossed-out lines with a strikethrough, and her inserted words in brackets:
Oh—did I offend it—Didn’t want me to tell it the truth Daisy—Daisy—offend it—who bends her smaller life to his [it’s] meeker [lower] every day—who only asks—a task who something to do for love of it—some little way she cannot guess to make that master glad.
A love so big it scares her, rushing among her small heart—pushing aside the blood—and leaving her [all] faint and white in the gust’s arm—
***
Oh how the sailor strains, when his boat is filling—Oh how the dying tug, till the angel comes. Master—open your life wide, and take [in] me in forever, I will never be tired—I will never be noisy when you want to be still—I will be [glad as the] your best little girl—nobody else will see me, but you—but that is enough—I shall not want any more—and all that Heaven will prove [only] disappoint me will be [because] it’s not so dear.
2. The obvious readings of the letters as being to an actual person make sense because this makes sense. To us. But not necessarily to Dickinson or the people of her time. The letters conjure something, something wonderful or terrible. Master. That word, which in 1861 had all sorts of meanings attached to it. Masters and servants, masters and slaves. God the Master. And Master, the Devil. In 1694, a little more than a year after the Salem witch trials had ended, a new case emerged involving a girl named Margaret Rule. Robert Calef, a Baptist cloth merchant from Boston who was critical of Cotton Mather and other clergy who had participated in the Salem events, visited the girl at her house and was present when Cotton Mather and his father Increase visited the house to question Margaret and where, among things, a “Master” was discussed. Although he completed More Wonders of the Invisible World in 1696 (the title is a play and a jab at Cotton Mather’s Wonders of the Invisible World) he couldn’t find a publisher until 1700. The book was publicly burned at Harvard by Increase Mather:
Question (asked by Cotton Mather): What, do there a great many witches sit upon you?
Answer: Yes.
Question: Do you not know that there is a hard Master? Then she was in a Fit; he laid his hand upon her Face and Nose, but, as he said, without perceiving Breath; then he brush’d her on the Face with his Glove, and rubb’d her Stomach (her breast not covered with the Bed-cloaths) and bid others do so too, and said it eased her, then she revived.
Question: Don’t you know there is a hard Master?
Answer: Yes.
Reply: Don’t serve that hard Master, you know who.
3. In the third letter to Master, Dickinson wrote:
I heard of a thing called “Redemption”—which rested men and women—You remember I asked you for it—you gave me something else—I forgot the Redemption in the Redeemed—I did’nt for a long time—but I knew you had altered me—I [and] was tired—no more—so dear did this stranger become, that were it, or my breath—the alternative—I had tossed the fellow awa with a smile.
4. The speaker of the letters refers to herself, in the third person, as Daisy. “Would Daisy disappoint you—no—she would’nt—Sir” she writes in the third letter, a pet name that was not uncommon in the nineteenth century. These are the only surviving Dickinson letters that use Daisy as a name like this. The flower is beautiful, but was also considered a weed-like pest. In The American Farmer’s Encyclopedia, from 1858, there is this entry on the daisy:
DAISY, COMMON, or DAY’S EYE (Bellis perennis). These large white gawky-looking flowers are so universal in English pastures and meadows, that description is almost needless. They flower all the year, principally dotting the meadows in early May. . .Domestic cattle rarely touch this plant. Notwithstanding its beauty and its celebration by poets, the daisy is thought a blemish or intruder in neat grass-plats, and can be overcome by perpetual stubbing only.
5. There is this, near the end of the third letter:
What would you do with me if I came “in white”? Have you the little chest—to put the alive—in? I want to see you more—Sir—than all I wish for in this world—and the wish—altered a little—will be my only one.
Why “altered a little”? She has injected mystery into mystery with those words. Because it is finally the odd cadences, the tense changes, the weird ghosts and fragments of thoughts and ideas that make the Master letters fresh and unsettling and radical in ways that, thank goodness, cannot be tamed. They escape all sorts of boundaries. Are they letters, or poems disguised as letters? If words could be gears, the Master letters would be a machine. It’s hard to tell when sentences end and begin, the words interlocking briefly and then falling away from each other. “What would you do with me if I came ‘in white’? Have you the little chest—to put the alive—in?” Probably written in the summer of 1861, the line is a sort of weird, refracted, reverse-image of the looming violence of the Civil War. The first major battle of that war—the First Battle of Bull Run—was fought in Virginia in July 1861. There were more casualties in that battle than any previous in American history.
“Have you the little chest—to put the alive—in?” Not the dead. That was Whitman’s province.
The “alive.”
6. In the first Master letter, dating from spring 1858, there are these teasing, conjuring lines:
You ask me what my flowers said—then they were disobedient—I gave them messages—
It’s not just the content that’s arresting (“what my flowers said”) but the syntax, which seems to bend and twist time. Does “then” in “then they were disobedient” mean something like “back then the flowers were disobedient”? Or maybe “afterwards they were disobedient”? We slip between the cracks of Dickinson’s words, into some other world, hinted at, glimpsed, pulsing just beneath the surface of everything.
21 responses
Wow. This is fascinating, thank you. I’m curious what you think of Susan Howe’s “My Emily Dickinson”? Reading your piece on the Master letters, took me down a path of Emily’s in a similar way, like an insistent river…
When I read about the Master Letters, I always think of Lucie Brock-Broido’s amazing poetry book, The Master Letters, inspired by the letters. Anybody who likes Dickinson’s letters should check out that book.
I would love to take this class. These are unsettling. Man.
Thanks for this fascinating read. Clearly the master letters are written to Emily’s inspiration — the same party Wallace Stevens addressed in Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction. So the master is a kind of god, one who visits her.
Beethoven wrote letters to his immortal beloved. It’s the same thing.
Regarding “what my flowers saidâ€- In the Victorian era there was a “language of flowers. Flowers were assigned different meanings and could be used to send a message when worn or presented to someone else, either singly or in various combinations. “Le Langage des Fleurs” by Charlotte de la Tour was the first “floriography”dictionary to be published around 1818. There was growing interest in England, the US and France and it became sort of a fad in the 1820’s-30’s. The language of flowers attracted the attention of women writers and editors of the time and was written about in publications such as the Saturday Evening Post and Godey’s Lady’s Book.
Thanks for the comments here and I especially appreciate the added context re: “what my flowers said,” Lisa. I highly recommend R.W. Franklin’s The Master Letters of Emily Dickinson, which an includes an envelope with facsimiles of the holograph letters, available at ABE Books.
Nick: Thanks for this — it’s wonderful.
The first person to give major support to my writing was Richard Sewall, Dickinson’s greatest biographer. I remember him telling me the story that while he was researching the book, he began to become overly absorbed in the question of the identity of “Master,” until a fellow teacher asked him bluntly one day: “Do you want a write a mystery?”
Richard did not. And instead he wrote something much fuller, more satisfying, and ultimately, as you imply, more mysterious: a profound biography.
Nick, I keep rereading this — it’s so wonderful.
In the Daisy passage, I think it’s possible that she’s concerned she offended the daisy. I think she loved the world around her in Amherst and she walked around talking to her inspiration (the master) and flowers, trees, insects every day. I think when she woke up she as hoping to see/feel the master in the leaves out her window. . I think she experienced a personnification of flowers, insects, clouds, even houses as part of her poetic sensibility and experience (she wrote a poem about housing holding the mysterious, when we pass them at night, like people’s minds). This is Harold Bloom would call the deep subjectivity necessary for great art.
Regarding Daisy she writes of ‘a love so big it scares her.’ I think she’s talking about the lifecycle of a daisy in a field — they seem to watch the sky. I don’t think Emily was scared of her love for her inspiration, for the master.
The stuff about Cotton Mather is really interesting. It shows that “Master” would have been an understood term for some kind of supernatural presence. Though with Emily I think it’s pretty safe to assume the Master was not a devil. I don’t think there was any master/slave stuff going on, but I do think she felt she was the master’s vessel. But I believe her poetic experience and inspiration involved something ‘coming over her.’
The cemetaries around Amherst are full of tombstone inscription such as:
We all have a debt to nature due
I’ve paid mine now so must you.
She talks about a chest to put the alive in because she sees us as being alive in death — she believes when she has died she will be more alive than she is now. Not in an organized religion way — it’s something her poetic inspiration has revealed to her – she’s sure of it.
I think the wish to ‘see you more sir” is ‘altered a little’ because she wants more than to see the master, she wants to be taken in by the master. She doesn’t want heaven, because she loves the inspiration she feels now so much.
Regarding the flowers misbehaved — I think she’s walking the garden imagining a conversation between the master, the flowers, and herself. If the master asks her what the flowers said, then the flowers didn’t give the master the message, like they were supposed to. Which is why she planted them — but I don’t think it’s purely logical. I’m writing here and I see my grand piano, I tell it, ‘kiss Beethoven for me’ and then I think about my favorite sonata, and imaging I’m talking to Beethoven, and Beethoven says, what was the piano telling me? She’s imagining a beautiful intimacy between the flowers, herself, and the master, kind of like two lovers with a dog. LOver A might say, what did Rover say? Lover B will say, he misbehaved, I gave him a message …..
Anyway, Nick, I so love thinking about all this. Thank you for being in the world and writing. Don’t stop. XO
Emily’s in an exalted trance-like state as she writes this, as Rilke was when he wrote the Duino elegies, as was Homer when he began the Odyssey with “Sing in me Oh Muse.” As was Whitman when he wrote Leaves of Grass, when he implores, “Outlines! I plead for my brothers and sisters.”
One are?
Fixed. Thank you muzzy. And Stella: I especially like your reference to the Amherst tombstones. I love thinking about this too.
Fascinating stuff — I’ve grown a bit obsessed with Emily the last few months, so I read this with avidity — thank you.
When I was a child, my (very proper and grammatically precise) Grandmother would address all letters to me as Master Benjamin ____ . Isn’t “Master” the male equivalent of “Miss” (unmarried youth)?
I think the master letters are as enigmatic and fascinating as Emily Dickinson poetry, and her “undiscovered” life
I found the article very interesting- I have head several versions
by different scholars about these letters- all were lucid,
well documented, but came to different conclusions
Thank you for your posts…I think the Master for Emily Dickinson is her personal, inspired synonym for God, and her writing, through mixed syntax and plays on words, attempts to transcend the concept of time/traditional conceptions of God, and points to her very private, profound and experiential relationship with her everything God. Thank you, Nick, for your research and, thank you, Emily, for continuing to inspire us!
I forgot what tangent lead me here, or what procrastination lead me further to read these comments, but I find it interesting to find so many interpreting the meaning of “The Master Letters” within the bounds of their own perceptions or belief systems.
Applying one’s own predispositions and prejudices to a new mystery in an attempt to provide an explanation satisfactory to one’s own narrow thinking is missing the point of learning and exposes one’s very limited perspective.
What this mystery requires is more study, more relevant perspectives, and more evidence – and a lot less unqualified noise about the meaning of the letters as applied to random people who are not Emily Dickinson.
I hope something new turns up, maybe in someone’s attic etc, that sheds new light.
Hi,
I do not understand why George Gould is not listed as a probable recipient of the famous Valentine published in the Amherst Literary Journal. I think that Gould is the likely intended in these Master Letters. Are you aware of the Carol Damon Andrews paper? What are the currently agreed upon facts? Was she ever engaged to Gould? Did her father, Edward Dickinson, disapprove of the union.
Let us shed some light on this episode.
I have done some correlating of time between the two star- crossed couple and so much seems to align.
Thanks
Joe DiMattio
I am the author Joe DiMattio mentions above, of the essay “Thinking Musically, Writing Expectantly: New Biographical Information about Emily Dickinson, published in the New England Quarterly for June 2008. I am almost finished writing a book about Emily Dickinson and George Gould, who was the chairman of the editors of The Indicator, the Amherst College student literary journal from 1849-1850. See pp. 338-339 for a discussion of Gould with respect to the Master Letters.
Carol Andrews
God and the Devil walked about in the struggle for human souls in 1690 during the Salem Witch Trials. Emily Dickinson was born 140 years later and never accepted membership in any church. More so, she seems most influenced by Transcendentalism than anything else. The notion of a personal, “I/Thou”, relationship with God is a decidedly twentieth century notion and one she well might not be familiar with.
I believe she was writing to a real person and not a personalized God. The tone of the letters suggests this person was a man. Correspondence in her day tended to be much more effusive than it is now, giving controversy as to whether the relationship was romantic. She is consistently shown as reserve with herself and her feelings toward others. For these reasons, the interpretation she was writing to someone she cared deeply for makes the greatest sense to me.
Should we ever know who this person was? Oh, I don’t know. I’m not sure how she would feel about our reading her private letters. Perhaps we will find out despite what she might see as intrusion into her life. And yet her poems show her inner self often and she did make effort for them to be published…
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