THE STONE FACE OF EMILY DICKINSON
by Amy Clampitt

Page 9

He came down and visited, and something happened that one doesn't know exactly, but there is a letter that she handed him that one can read in the collected letters of George Eliot and it is out of that circumstance that this poem comes:

MEDUSA AT BROADSTAIRS

A seaside place so tranquil
her very mind might drift, grow indolent,
become a tidepool: the articulate spine,
its resolutions and attenuations--all
acquired at such a price--
sweetly let go.

This couldn't last, of course. It never did.

On Saturday the 10th, H.S. came down--
to whom she'd cheerfully agreed
(and let the fact be widely known)
that she was not attached.

No use. The unwanted love-child of a note
she evidently handed him survives. The stored-up
spikenard of ardor in its ungainly vessel--
whole forests of it, bending and shimmering--
again refused. Aged thirty-three
and still so quick to feel, so soon
a rigid gazingstock.

Night terrors. The huge claustrophobia of childhood
starting up again: the dried shriek,
the claw about the windpipe.

Medusa, whether stinging jelly with no back bone
or stare of fury petrified,
in wait: the obscure cold pool
where Hetty, unlikely early offspring of George Eliot--
mindless, adorable, the smoldering dark girl
who must, her fatuous ardor ditched,
be done away with--will not be brave enough
to drown herself, to have it over:

The motions of a little vessel without ballast
(she'd write): the horrors
of this cold, and darkness, and solitude,
out of all human reach, becoming greater
every minute . . . The bitter waters spread,
the Arthur Donnithornes, the Stephen Guests
ride by: John Chapman, Herbert Spencer:
"If you become attached to someone else"
(she ignominiously writes) "then I must die."

There will be more: the sudden cold
about the knees, the inundated threshold,
Maggie Tullliver awake, borne outward
by (recurring nightmare of her childhood)
the actual surge: the same dark girl
grown tall and mindful, whose excesses
must be done away with, drowned.

George Eliot is not yet, Hetty Sorel not yet,
nor Maggie Tulliver, except (If you
become attached to someone else . . . )
in aching embryo. Only
long-faced, brainy Marian, prone
to hysterics. Back in London,
the usual observances--four walls
closing in, headache that lasts an age-- are sure to follow.


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