#THE HALF LIFE OF LOVE IS FOREVER FULL#

вЂњWe are the only poets,вЂќ Emily told Susan, вЂњand everyone else is prose.вЂќД«y early 1852, the poet was besotted beyond words. The two young women took long walks in the woods together, exchanged books, read poetry to each other, and commenced an intense, intimate correspondence that would evolve and permute but would last a life- time. Nearly two decades after Susan entered her heart, she would write with unblunted desire:ДЄ tempest of intimacy swirled over the eighteen months following SusanвЂ™s arrival into the DickinsonsвЂ™ lives. But EmilyвЂ™s was no temporary infatuation.

Now both she and her brother found themselves in a strange bewitchment of figures, placing Susan at one point of a triangle. вЂњBest Witchcraft is Geometry,вЂќ Emily Dickinson would later write.

Susan Gilbert (Harvard University, Houghton Library)

#THE HALF LIFE OF LOVE IS FOREVER FULL#

Sister and brother alike were taken with her poised erudition and her Uranian handsomeness - her flat, full lips and dark eyes were not exactly masculine, her unchiseled oval face and low forehead not exactly feminine. Poised and serious at twenty, dressed in black for the sister who had just died in childbirth and who had been her maternal figure since their parentsвЂ™ death, Susan cast a double enchantment on Emily and Austin Dickinson. She entered DickinsonвЂ™s life in the summer of 1850, which the poet would later remember as the season вЂњwhen love first began, on the step at the front door, and under the Evergreens.вЂќ Susan Gilbert had settled in Amherst, to be near her sister, after graduating from the Utica Female Academy - one of a handful of academically rigorous educational institutions available to women at the time. (Amherst College Archives & Special Collections, gift of Millicent Todd Bingham, 1956) The only authenticated photograph of the poet. (This essay is drawn from my book.) Emily Dickinson at seventeen. I devote more than one hundred pages of Figuring to their beautiful, heartbreaking, unclassifiable relationship that fomented some of the greatest, most original and paradigm-shifting poetry humanity has ever produced. Throughout the poetвЂ™s life, Susan would be her muse, her mentor, her primary reader and editor, her fiercest lifelong attachment, her вЂњOnly Woman in the World.вЂќ

Four months before her twentieth birthday, Emily Dickinson (December 10, 1830вЂ“May 15, 1886) met the person who became her first love and remained her greatest - an orphaned mathematician-in-training by the name of Susan Gilbert, nine days her junior.

The half life of love is forever