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Kate’s reminiscence (in 1917) of Emily at the Evergreens in 1859,“with her dog, & Lantern! often at the piano playing weird & wonderful melodies, all from her own inspiration, oh! She was a choice spirit!” These “weird and wonderful” riffs do mirror the music of her poems, and we can see how Dickinson loved to improvise, but she remains a moving target, hard to find. “Biography first convinces us of the fleeing of the Biographied—” she wrote to Higginson in 1885. [Letter 972]
    I believe she suffered horrendously as a woman; dream brides drift in and out of her poems like a continual nightmare—yet she did not want to be “Bridalled.” Sometimes she was married to God, with her “Title divine,” sometimes to the Devil. Like Sue herself, she had a genuine fear of male sexuality, that infernal “man of noon,” who scorches and scalds every little virgin flower—“they know that the man of noon, is mightier than the morning and their life is henceforth to him. Oh, Susie, it is dangerous, and it is all too dear, these simple trusting spirits, and the spirits mightier, which we cannot resist! It does rend me, Susie, the thought of it when it comes, that I tremble lest at sometime I, too, am yielded up.” [Letter 93, 1852]
    She had a plan for Sue and herself, a lifetime of love and devotion to the one craft that was open to women—“we are the only poets, and everyone else is prose .”      [Letter 56, October 9, 1851] Together they might defeat or outfox “the man of noon.” But Sue was an orphan in search of a home. She couldn’t practice her craft in the poorhouse. And so she yielded herself up to Austin, this willful girl who seemed to have such a sway over Emily all her life. So many of Dickinson’s poems and letters are like dream songs, where she had to borrow from Shakespeare to change her sex, morph into some Marc Antony trying to conquer that Cleopatra who lived next door. . . .
    I believe that her rebellion against the culture of nineteenth-century Amherst was of another kind. She was promiscuous in her own fashion, deceiving everyone around her with the sly masks she wore. She was faithful to no one but her dog. Her white dress was one more bit of camouflage, to safeguard the witchery of her craft. It may have been an act of impersonation, as Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar suggest in The Madwoman in the Attic, but I don’t agree that Dickinson, decked in white, became“a helpless agoraphobic, trapped in her room in her father’s house.” There’s a different tale to tell.
    She played the role of little girl that nineteenth-century women were meant to play. But she was far from a little girl, even if she told Higginson, “I have a little shape—it would not crowd your Desk—nor make much Racket as the Mouse, that dents your Galleries—” [Letter 265] It was one more act of seduction. She must have sensed her own monstrous powers—this Vesuvius at Home. The Brain, she would write, is wider than the Sky.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  The Brain is just the weight of God—
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  For—Heft them—Pound for Pound—
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  And they will differ—if they do—
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  As Syllable from Sound —      [Fr598]
    She may have sent her letter-poems to favorite friends like little bombs of love, but I don’t believe she ever meant to share her own “experiments” with anyone else. Higginson was reluctant to unclasp her Portfolio—poems plucked up from the roots of her mind. But she wasn’t boasting when she said—twice—that he had saved her life, not because he had much to say about her poems. He didn’t. But he cared for his half-cracked poetess, must have sniffed her greatness and her suffering. He wasn’t a fool. He just