Life Without Home, For the Last Time

Abstract

In Dickinson’s 1864 letter to Higginson, her grief at living away from the Homestead suffuses her prose: “I was ill since September, and since April, in Boston, for a Physician’s Care—He does not let me go, yet I work in my Prison, and make Guests for myself.” It is this letter that speaks with sympathy of her dog, “Carlo did not come, because that he would die, in Jail, and the Mountains, I could not hold now …” (LII 431). Her word choice is vivid—“Prison,” “Jail,” being away from her “Mountains”—and then toward the end of page one, Dickinson asks “Can you render my Pencil? The Physician has taken away my Pen.” The word for a synthesis of these emotions must be either bereavement or, in Dickinson’s spelling, wo.