“Life is a spell so exquisite that everything conspires to break it.”
“Those who have not found the heaven below, will fail of it above.”
Her light reaches us from the gloom of 19th century New England like a glow through the cracks of a just-open coffer. If it opened fully the light would be blinding. She is enigmatic, and perfectly clear, reaching us as two people: the poet, and the woman. The woman saw the natural so brilliantly the poet could render it mystical. It’s a shame scholarship has claimed her; she’s too rare to be discussed.
She lived in that hazy margin when you might have been photographed, and you might not. She was—definitely once, possibly twice. The “definitely” was the well-known daguerreotype of c.1847 when she was a sixteen year old schoolgirl. The “possibly” is the more recently unearthed daguerreotype of c.1859, when she was twenty-eight, pictured with her friend Kate Scott Turner. If the photograph is authentic, something less of the “debauchee of dew,” and more of the woman who had created a brilliant new species of poetry and felt herself worthy of recognition, sits with her arm on her friend and her eyes on us.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the Unitarian minister, abolitionist, and writer/editor to whom she had slantedly petitioned and sent a few early poems, did not get, but was charmed by, her, and asked for a photograph. “Could you believe me without,” she replied. “I had no portrait, now, but am small, like the Wren, and my Hair is bold, like the Chestnut Bur—and my eyes, like the Sherry in the Glass, that the Guest leaves—would this do just as well?”
Why did Higginson ask for a photograph? Same reason we would have: we just like to put a face to things. And that’s been possible only since about the mid-19th century—and natural, un-corpselike portraits some decades later. Wouldn’t we love to see a modern-quality snapshot of Shakespeare? Could a being so talented really have been human? You’d think his body would fracture trying to contain it all. Or Sappho, Homer, Genghis Khan, Cleopatra—make your own list.
She loved her years at Amherst Academy, and knew homesickness in her otherwise richly rewarding time at Mt. Holyoke, and was no stranger to loneliness, but with the soul to think “it might be lonelier without the loneliness.” And you have to wonder if we would think of her the same if she existed for us in a photographic portfolio of natural situations: In her prime at her writing desk. Spying a narrow fellow in the grass. Experiencing a wild night. Keeping the Sabbath at home. Looking out her window at the goings-on in the opposite house. Holding her own as a religiously hopeless student. On a walk contemplating death and the curious notion of immortality. Her bemused face remembering a certain slant of light, or the snow inching up the fenceposts like the ankles of a queen. What if she had been photographed as much as, say, the Beatles? Would she have the same mystique? Or conversely, what if the Beatles hadn’t been photographed at all? Like Beethoven or Bach. How would we picture the faces behind those voices? The writers of those tunes? What if you could only imagine what John Lennon looked like? What would you see?
This is the point where you say: You don’t have to imagine! With AI!
And I have to admit it is intriguing to look at those AI-generated historical figures derived from painting or sculpture, coin or shroud. Jesus. Alexander the Great. Elizabeth I. But there’s also a certain National Enquirer boorishness about it. Google the most photographed people in the world, and prepare for a visit to the frog bog.
There’s a reason for religious aniconism. To depict is to limit. We don’t need pictures of the spirits we commune with. They’re meant only for the eyes of the soul. Too bright for our infirm delight.
Reveal yourself slant. And dazzle gradually.