Singing Off Charnel Steps: Lessons for a Preceptor

Abstract

Central among the sacred texts transformed by Emily Dickinson for her poetic purposes were the King James Version of the Bible and the hymns of Isaac Watts. The martial imagery prevalent in Dickinson’s poems, early and late, was a pervasive presence in the Bible and in Watts — familiar to her from childhood on.¹ A hymn by Watts titled ‘Holy Fortitude; or, The Christian Soldier’ includes stanzas that provide an answer to an opening question (‘Am I a soldier of the cross?’):

Sure I must fight, if I would reign;

Increase my courage, Lord;

I’ll bear the toil, endure the pain,

Supported by thy word.

Thy saints, in all this glorious war,

Shall conquer, though they die;

They view the triumph from afar,

And seize it with their eye.²

Watts’s hymn is listed, in the ‘New Index of Subjects’ prepared for the 1834 edition owned by Edward Dickinson, under the heading: ‘Warfare, spiritual.’³