Notes on
The White Election

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was born and died in the “Brick House” or “Homestead” her grandfather had built in his heyday as founder of Amherst Academy and Amherst College. Writing and family gave her enough to do. We know 1775 of her poems, and 1049 of her letters. The tone is playful, the language puzzling, the content profound. Only eleven of the poems were published in her lifetime. The survival of so many letters, even so, suggests that her gift had been recognized within her circle. The rest lay in a chest by her bed, or were mailed with her letters. Her sister Lavinia and a few other friends published some of these, at their own expense, beginning in 1890. Early editions sold out, and Emily’s fame was assured. Squabbles over rights delayed a complete and authentic printing until the 1959 Harvard Press Variorum, edited by Thomas Johnson.
The White Election is meant to tell her story in her words. It is the story of a poet, and the business of poets is to observe and invent. Are her love poems, among the most desolating in the language, simply inventions? If not, who does she mean? The most likely suggestions include Charles Wadsworth, Otis Lord and Samuel Bowles, all leaders of opinion, all a generation older, and all happily married. We might like it to be the handsome and gregarious Bowles, whose Springfield Republican published six of her poems. Judge Lord is an even stronger candidate, since he and Emily became engaged after his wife died, when she was 47 and he 66. But I will argue, as Johnson does, that the evidence favors Wadsworth over both, and over the null hypothesis that the “dim companion” of those poems was wholly a pretend person.
They cannot have met often. Wadsworth was pastor of the Arch Street Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, and famous for his sermons. Mark Twain poked fun at his rhetoric. Emily and Lavinia traveled to Washington in 1854 to visit their father while he served in Congress, and may have met Wadsworth then. We know that he visited the Homestead in 1859 and 1880. His one surviving letter to “My Dear Miss Dickenson” (sic), which has not been dated, begins “I am distressed beyond measure at your note. I can only imagine the affliction which has befallen, or is now befalling you…” This suggests that she had written him, and that no actual romance had taken place.
We do have a letter from Emily to her Philadelphia friends the Josiah Hollands asking that something enclosed be sent on to “our arch friend,” and we have letters after his death describing him as her “closest” and “dearest earthly friend.”
Evidence that Wadsworth was the Dim Companion, if only in her mind, comes mostly from her poetry itself, as we will see, and from the second of the three draft letters addressed to “Master.” Johnson dates these letters to 1858, 1861, and 1862, more or less, from her handwriting. Through all Emily’s letters are love letters in the wide sense, the second and third Master letters are implorations. The second includes “If it had been God’s will that I might breathe where you breathe…to come nearer than Presbyteries, and nearer than the new coat that the tailor made…” “Presbyteries” (ecclesiastical courts) does not seem to fit at all unless for Wadsworth, who was America’s most famous Presbyterian minister after Henry Ward Beecher. Neither Bowles nor Lord was Presbyterian, and neither showed particular interest in religion.
In 1862, Wadsworth became pastor of the First Calvary Presbyterian Church in San Francisco, remaining there eight years. The period 1861-1865 is Emily’s most productive, if the handwriting analysis is right, and brings her first death-marriage poems. White is decreed in tradition for weddings and funerals. Emily tells us in these poems that for her, these two events would be as one. She will be “born, bridaled, shrouded in a day.” In heaven she will be “dressed to meet you, see, in white.” The Dim Companion will be “Mine, by the right of the White Election…Mine, by the Grave’s Repeal!…” It was in this period that Emily began wearing white.
The evidence for Wadsworth in these poems is mainly the reference to Calvary. Calvary is mentioned nine times in this period, according to Johnson, and not before. Emily was not religious at any age; she sometimes writes about religion, but more as a merry critic, except in the love poems, than as a participant. Although Calvary is a more natural metaphor for suffering than presbyteries for closeness, nine mentions of Calvary, packed in this period, are enough to make the case for Wadsworth.
Emily had studied voice and piano, and sometimes played at home. A friend remembers:
Oftentimes, during these visits to the Dickinson relative, father would be awakened from his sleep by heavenly music. Emily would explain in the morning, ‘I can improvise better at night.’ On one to two occasions, when not under their friendly roof, my father, in playing his respects at the house, would received a message from his cousin Emily saying, ‘If you will stay in the next room, and open the folding doors a few inches, I’ll come down to make music for you.’ My father said that in those early days she seemed like a will-o-the-wisp.
Another visitor recalls the Emily was “often at the piano playing weird and beautiful melodies, all from her own inspiration.” Emily herself writes to a friend, “I play the old, odd tunes yet, which used to flit about your head after honest hours.”
All this inspires the conjecture that Emily may have set her own poems to music, or even conceived of some of them as songs in the first place. I have set them, in large part, just as Emily might have if her music had found a balance between tradition and iconoclasm something like that in her poems.

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