"Gallanter"

If you don't know the whole story, it's not hard to hold some animosity towards this guy. His name is Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and he was a true American blue blood, descended from Massachusetts Bay Puritan stock, preachers too. He plays a leading role in the life of a great American poet, Emily Dickinson, who saw in him, a magazine editor, someone who had at least some sense of what she was doing on paper.

To say Emily Dickinson fell in love with Thomas Higginson may be overstatement, but Ms. Emily's imagination was as wide as the horizon, ample space for any speculation. What is verifiably true is that Higginson noted the strength of her poetry. That was all he needed to do. To her, he became a lover thereby.

For years, that was just about all I knew of the man. To me, he seemed something of a jerk because he didn't follow up on his own kindness. He entered Ms. Emily's life with a few sweet words and then, seemingly, forgot her, a Puritan cad.

But, as the old photograph makes clear, Thomas Wentworth Higginson was neither a cad nor a recluse. He was one of "the Sacred Six," the secret financial supporters of John Brown, the John Brown of Harpers Ferry fame. An ardent abolitionist, Higginson charged into the Civil War and was given command of the First South Carolina Volunteers, the very first regiment created from "freedmen," ex-slaves who'd escaped to fight for the North.

If he didn't court Dickinson's favor as he might have--or as she seemed to want to imagine him doing--his inattention wasn't borne out of laziness or abuse. The man was busy. There was a war on--yes, there certainly was, brother vs. brother.

I can't help but think that maybe Thomas Wentworth Higginson is here in #138. This is Emily Dickinson's characteristically spare verse. She used them sparingly because she believed in words.

To fight aloud, is very brave -
But gallanter, I know
Who charge within the bosom
The Cavalry of Wo--

Never mind her spelling, you catch the drift. I'm suggesting Captain Thomas Wentworth Higginson is the man fighting "aloud," maybe even getting headlines--and that's all fine. But, Ms. Emily says, those who fight secret battles of the heart are "gallanter," a word my spell check doesn't recognize. But, there's more:

Who win, and nations do not see -
Who fall - and none observe -
Whose dying eyes, no Country
Regards with patriotic love -

We all have our own battles, don't we? And the warfare that rages within us--many of us anyway--is often covert, something, no one else sees. That beneath-the-surface and in-the-soul warfare, she says, is gallanter.

And it may well have its own rewards--emphasis on may. She moves to a third person narration in the last stanza and begins with "We trust," a phrase which hopes for the best but refuses to totally trust.

We trust, in plumed procession
For such, the Angels go -
Rank after Rank, with even feet -
And Uniforms of snow.

It's quite a blessed and expansive vision, don't you think? Those who battle in secret can look around and see "rank after rank" of angels, in feathery procession, dressed like the military, save one feature--the uniforms are made of snow. We trust that is so, at least. That's Emily Dickinson's characteristic doubt.

I'm speculating, of course, but within the context of Ms. Emily's own life, the poem may well suggest that this man whose attention she craved, off fighting somewhere in a very public war, didn't know the fierce battle he'd created in her heart and soul.

All of that is possible, but purely speculative--and, because it's so biographical it reduces, horribly, the potential reach of what Dickinson says. No matter how she meant it, those few words Ms. Dickinson left on the page carry meaning far beyond her editor/warrior.

More on that tomorrow.