Otis Phillips Lord, Edward Dickinson’s old friend and a judge on the Massachusetts supreme court, had studied law at Amherst just before Emily was born and during the first 18 months of her life. He had graduated in 1832, and Amherst had conferred on him an honorary doctor of laws in 1869. He was married to Elizabeth Farley, a high-minded descendant of John Leverett, president of Harvard. They were childless and lived near the Witch House in Salem. The Lords used to stay at the Homestead, and after Edward died, “the dear Lords,” as Emily wrote, continued to visit. The judge appears to have come on his own for a week in October 1875, when Emily, far from reclusive, spoke of his visit as being “with me.”
Mrs. Lord died in December 1877, on Emily’s 47th birthday. Over the next few months, Emily turned to the handsome widower – not as a father but as a suitor of sorts. Later, a granddaughter of Dickinson’s confidante Elizabeth Holland suggested that Lord’s tenderness had “long been latent in his feeling for her.” Dickinson expert and Mount Holyoke College professor Christopher Benfey has asserted this possibility more strongly, suggesting in his book A Summer of Hummingbirds that the attraction went back to the summer of 1862, when Lord came to Amherst as commencement speaker.
Eighteen years her senior, his gray hair was shading into white; his expression calm and contained – not a man to exact attention, though his grave and upright bearing subdued others, not only the guilty, as he passed judgment. Lord looked stern “as the Profile of a Tree against a winter sky,” Emily ventured to say. He appeared as rigid as Emily’s father, but she had a way with elders of this sort, breezing through their barest branches. Her amusing darts disarmed men of law who were accustomed to wither lesser beings; the drafts of her letters to Lord are witty, confident, open, and playfully physical – hardly the way modest women were meant to behave. Gossip had it that Emily’s sister-in-law, Susan, had been taken aback to break in on the supposed recluse, the image of white-frocked chastity, in the judge’s arms.
Lord’s niece Abbie Farley claimed to have heard Susan deplore that embrace. Emily, the niece is reported to have said, had not “any idea of morality.” She was bound to take this view, for Miss Farley, aged 35, was the judge’s heir. She and her mother, Mrs. Lord’s sister, were due to inherit jointly $23,000. Together with another niece on the Farley side (due to inherit $10,000), they kept house for the judge. If he remarried, he would have new claims. “Little hussy,” Abbie fumed over a copy of Emily’s Poems decades later when questioned about the celebrated poet Abbie had once known. “Loose morals,” Abbie remembered. “She was crazy about men. Even tried to get Judge Lord. Insane too.”
To Emily herself, Lord’s love was “Improbable.” It would have been unthinkable in her father’s lifetime: his carefully protected daughter permitting such license, and with his old friend. The voice of judgment, “I say unto you” thundering through the startled air at morning prayers, had cleansed impurities from the minds of Edward Dickinson’s listeners. As Emily put it humorously, “Fumigation ceased when Father died.” Now, four years on, that voice no longer ruled. In her late 40s and early 50s, she found herself free to partake of the forbidden tree.
With Lord, Emily was unafraid to speak up, inviting a glint of humor she called “the Judge Lord brand.” A smile broke when she teased him with the solemnities of courtroom language. “Crime,” “confess,” “punish,” “penalty,” “incarcerate” were the words she applied to his supposed trial of her as a wanting lover. “I confess that I love him,” she has to admit, but cannot pay the “debt” she owes him. Can her “involuntary Bankruptcy” be a crime? Will he “punish” her? “Incarcerate me in yourself – that will punish me,” she makes bold to suggest.
Flashing repartee of this sort exploded into intimacy within months of Mrs. Lord’s death. That year, 1878, there’s immediate talk of consummation. She wasn’t shy when she drafted her letters to Lord: “lift me back, wont you, for only there [in your arms] I ask to be. . . .” He was her “lovely Salem”; she, his “Amherst.” Weekly letters, directed to arrive on Mondays by the judge’s habits of punctuality, bonded Salem and Amherst. Emily’s “little devices to live till Monday” – attempts to concentrate on work – gave way to “the thought of you.” So she said to herself, if not to Salem, in a penciled scrap that breaks into verse celebrating the nature of love (fleet, indiscreet, wrong, and joyful).
As a single man, it was no longer proper for Lord to stay at the Homestead on his now more frequent trips to Amherst; he and Emily met in the parlor. There, they held each other while the air about them fanned the question of marriage. In August and September of 1880, he practically lived in Amherst. During this time, they may have entered into some kind of private engagement. Softly, her thin hand is offered to him in response to what she calls “your distant hope.” He leaves saying it had been a “heavenly hour.” How sweet was his candor, she wrote.
His racy talk, familiar to colleagues on the bench, called out an unfamiliar side to Emily. “I will not wash my arm,” she said, “twill take your touch away,” and again: “It is strange that I miss you at night so much when I was never with you – but the punctual love invokes you soon as my eyes are shut – and I wake warm with the want sleep had almost filled. . .”
The question of marriage came up more seriously in November and December 1882, after Emily’s mother, also named Emily, had died. Eyeing the poet’s thinness, Lord teased her as “Emily Jumbo” (the famous elephant, Jumbo, in Barnum’s circus had recently appeared near Amherst). She tossed the joke back.
“Sweetest name, but I know a sweeter – Emily Jumbo Lord. Have I your approval?”
He assumed that she was now freed to live with him. He replied, “I will try not to make it unpleasant.”
She was touched that he could invite her into his “dear Home” with “loved timidity.” Her answer, as often when she was moved, almost falls into verse.
“So delicate a diffidence, how beautiful to see! I do not think a Girl extant has so divine a modesty. You even call me to your Breast with apology! Of what must my poor Heart be made?”
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