Dickinson

Dickinson

Family Association

SCRAPBOOK

TEXT OF TALK BY

POLLY LONGSWORTH

AT 2008 REUNION

SATURDAY, JUNE 21, 2008

AMHERST COLLEGE

AMHERST, MA

Grounds of Memory

By Polly Longsworth

“Remembrance is the only paradise from which we cannot be banished. Even the first parents could not be driven from it.”

These lines from Jean Paul Richter, a German Romantic novelist who was a favorite of Emily Dickinson’s, must have intrigued her

when she read them excerpted in the Amherst College Indicator, a student publication she read avidly around age twenty. A poet who lived largely in retrospect, Dickinson reminds us often that memory rouses both pleasure and pain.

“Through those old grounds of memory, /The sauntering alone / Is a divine intemperance /A prudent man would shun” begins one of several poems she wrote about remembering. One of the Museum’s most popular tours is named “Grounds of Memory.” It’s a self-guided audio tour in which visitors wander the Homestead and Evergreen grounds with portable wands, stopping at stations to listen to brief narratives and poet Richard Wilbur’s readings of Dickinson’s poems. It’s a transcendent way to spend part of a day.

For the poet, a literal “grounds of memory” existed next door to the home she lived in on West Street from ages nine to twenty-four. This was the Center Burying Ground, which underwent transformation from an unkempt, neglected site to an attractive rural park during the years 1840–1855 that the Dickinsons lived alongside it. Once the civic-minded Edward Dickinson witnessed beautiful Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, he led an effort to improve the forlorn Amherst burial spot by overseeing the planting of trees, bringing order to scattered graves, repairing tombstones, setting carriage lanes, building a town tomb, and hiring caretakers. Sufficient evidence in her poems indicates that while these changes ensued, Emily spent many hours playing and strolling among the gravestones, noting “the lone Orthography / of the elder dead.”

An early memorable experience would have been the bringing home to the Center Burying Ground of the coffins of Dickinson’s paternal grandparents. Samuel Fowler Dickinson had died in Hudson, Ohio in 1838; his wife, Lucretia Gunn Dickinson, died at Enfield, Massachusetts two years later. During the 1840s, at a date unknown, their remains were transported and reinterred at Amherst, and a single marble slab erected, probably by Edward. The stone’s epitaph can no longer be read, but said: “If a man die shall he live? For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him.”

The epitaph was published in an 1850 book called Inscriptions on the Grave Stones in the Grave Yards of Northampton and…(several surrounding towns)…, of which there were five copies in the

Dickinson library. The first sentence, from the Book of Job, was a poignant reminder of Fowler Dickinson’s financial bankruptcy, incurred in the founding of Amherst College, which brought hardship upon his family and sent him into self-exile in Ohio, far from the town he loved. The Bible answers Job’s question in the negative, but Fowler’s children attempted an earthly salvation by bringing him home, and coupling the query with St. Paul’s affirming promise in the new Testament that for those who believe in Jesus, as Fowler did, resurrection is assured.

In 1881, a couple of years before the first Dickinson family reunion, Edward’s brother William erected another, more elaborate monument to Fowler and Lucretia, amidst the graves of Amherst’s earliest ministers and the first president of Amherst College, where he must have felt his father belonged. Visitors to Amherst

can check out both stones in what is today called West Cemetery.

Perhaps one then understands more fully poem Fr 1385, in which the poet wrote that when sweeping the “sacred Closet” of memory, one must “Select a reverential Broom—And do it silently—”

Longsworth was the featured speaker at the Dickinson Family Association reunion held in June 2008 at Amherst College where she shared these remarks.

GROUP PICTURE FROM 2008 REUNION

SATURDAY, JUNE 21, 2008

AMHERST COLLEGE

AMHERST, MA

GROUP PICTURE FROM 2007 REUNION

SATURDAY, JUNE 23

WESTFIELD STATE COLLEGE

WESTFIELD, MA

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