After politics, poetry

Almost two weeks of founding fathers, great presidents, Generals, influential Supreme Court Justices, John Dewey, Jim Crow, Martin Luther King, George W. Bush, Obama; it was time to ask, "Where are the ladies?"

Emily Dickinson's house in Amherst provided something of an antidote: poems, flowers, dresses, baking, gardening, pianos, paintings, furnishings, sisters, neices, friends, wives, mothers and mistresses.

She lived for most of her life in this house on a street running down from the village square, surrounded by equally gracious homes in expansive wooded grounds.

The photo is taken off the web because, of course, there was a violent thunderstorm while I was there, and going outside to take photos would have resulted in another instant drenching (something I didn't avoid so much as postpone).

It is hard not to fall in love with the story of Emily Dickinson, if not her poetry. She wrote more than 1700 poems in her life, but only 10 of them were published while she was alive - and those without her permission.

She was the middle of three children: an older brother Austin, and younger sister Lavinia. Emily and Lavinia lived in this house until their death, while Austin built another house next door, 'Evergreens', where he lived with his wife and family until his death.

Between the two houses was a path through the trees, 'just wide enough for two who love', and their umbrellas:

Emily herself never married, but was very close to her brother and his wife, Susan, as well as to their three children. One of the children, Martha, herself became an important poet. Another child, Gilbert, died aged 8 of typhoid fever. Upon his death in 1883, his nursery was sealed off, not to be reopened until the house was bought by a Trust in 1988. Now you can peer through a roped off window at his little velvet suit laid out on the bed, and his wooden toys cast across the floor. The pathos! Truly, it was all I could do not to sob, wildly, on the spot.

From the time she was a small child she collected and pressed botanical species in what were called 'herbariums'. This is a picture of her first set of specimens: jasmine and privet. Historians have wondered if she was aware of the symbolic meaning of this choice, Jasmine being associated both with poetry and passion, while privet symolises privacy.

In her lifetime she was best known as a gardener, and later, as a recluse who always wore white. Earlier in her life, however, she was also known locally for her love both of baking and of children, expressed by her habit of lowering basketfuls of home-made gingerbread out her second-story bedroom window to children below. According to our guide, another Emily, (this one a history major at UMass), the basket was frequently returned with a little flower in it.

In her letters, many of which are collected at nearby Amherst College, and at Harvard, she is wry and witty, but humour is less apparent in her poems.

Here's a cheery one quite unlike the the violet-decorated Desiderata placed all around the sorority house:

Compensation

For each ecstatic instant

We must an anguish pay

In keen and quivering ratio

to the ecstasy.

For each beloved hour

Sharp pittances of years,

Bitter contested farthings

And coffers heaped with tears.

That is pretty much how I felt when, dripping wet, I parked my bike outside the store with the flashing 'Liquor' sign, only to have the sign switch off as I reached the door. I had been told that this was a store that sold good wine, unlike the Indian convenience store from which I had bought an undrinkable bottle of French red last weekend.

False alarm! It was a power cut! With how much anguish must I pay for this moment of ecstasy?

Perhaps not with anguish, but with donuts.

As we were the last to leave the dining hall tonight, they donated two trays of donuts to our table.

The pinot is a New Zealand one - Aqus - a Coopers Creek label, but will it go with American cuisine?