Going to him! Happy letter!

GOING to him! Happy letter! Tell him—
Tell him the page I did n’t write;
Tell him I only said the syntax,
And left the verb and the pronoun out.
Tell him just how the fingers hurried,	5
Then how they waded, slow, slow, slow;
And then you wished you had eyes in your pages,
So you could see what moved them so.
“Tell him it was n’t a practised writer,
You guessed, from the way the sentence toiled;	10
You could hear the bodice tug, behind you,
As if it held but the might of a child;
You almost pitied it, you, it worked so.
Tell him—No, you may quibble there,
For it would split his heart to know it,	15
And then you and I were silenter.
“Tell him night finished before we finished,
And the old clock kept neighing ‘day!’
And you got sleepy and begged to be ended—
What could it hinder so, to say?	20
Tell him just how she sealed you, cautious,
But if he ask where you are hid
Until to-morrow,—happy letter!
Gesture, coquette, and shake your head!

In ‘Going to Him!’ Dickinson speaks directly to a ‘letter’ that she has written, presumably to a lover that she cannot be with. Whilst the letter is ‘going to him’ she, seemingly, cannot. That the letter is personified as ‘happy’ signifies Dickinson’s love for this man: the implication is surely that seeing this unnamed man brings happiness – even to an inanimate object – whilst she is forlorn because she cannot be with him. That Dickinson chooses such a childlike adjective to open her poem and – rather than her characteristic dash – uses two exclamation marks, combines to give it an immediately playful and joyful tone.

Sudden extreme anaphoric repetition is used in the following three lines, combined with the return of the dash, as Dickinson stutters three times over the phrase ‘tell him’. These devices blend to introduce hesitancy to the lyric. The speaker is experiencing a struggle to communicate her true feelings, something that is borne out by the fact that there is a whole ‘page [she] didn’t write –’. Indeed, the dash after this phrase almost becomes symbolic of this communicative lacuna, representing as it does an absence of adequate language. Sadly, what this lyric categorically does not do is compensate for the ‘page’ missed out from the letter. Rather than filling this gap in the poem, Dickinson remains obscure, telling her letter that she only said the ‘syntax’ and left the ‘verb’ and ‘pronoun’ out.

It would surely be reductive to assign concrete values to these ambiguous terms. The verb could be ‘love’, the pronoun perhaps ‘I’, ‘you’, or indeed both, however we are only guessing. That Dickinson only ‘said the Syntax’ implies that her letter was somehow restricted, governed by rules: for whatever reason, she felt (and indeed still feels) unable to break free from this restriction. As she phrases it in ‘It was not Death’, her life – or in this case her letter – is ‘shaven’ and ‘fitted to a frame’. Indeed, the sibilant quality of ‘said the Syntax’ seems to simultaneous create a regretful tone – as though she wished she could have said more than decorum demanded, and a whispering quality –implying her feeling that she and her letter need to be secretive together. Perhaps what she truly wishes to say mustn’t be uttered aloud.

As the stanza continues we gain an insight into Dickinson’s emotional state as she was involved in the process of the letter’s composition. At times her ‘fingers hurried’, and at others they ‘waded – slow – slow –’. Dickinson shifts from the quick, clipped vowels of ‘fingers hurried’ to the elongated and repetitive vowels and ‘w’ sound of ‘waded – slow – slow –’ to control the movement of this section of her poem, increasing and decreasing the pace of reading as the speed of her letter writing hurried and slowed. Indeed, this is further emphasised by the sudden proliferation of dashes through the latter line. In this slower moment, so beautiful crafted for the reader, she imagines that her letter wished it had ‘eyes’ in its ‘pages’ so that it could see what ‘moved’ Dickinson to suddenly write at such a laborious pace. The effect of this is to undermine Dickinson’s assertion at the beginning of stanza two that the ‘sentence toiled’ simply because she is not a ‘Practised Writer’. Given Dickinson’s remarkable poetic output one cannot help but see this as a hollow excuse.

Rather, we might focus (once again) on what Dickinson doesn’t wish to say rather than what she does, if we are to guess at what it is she wishes to communicate and what ‘moves’ her:

Tell Him – no – you may quibble there –

For it would split His Heart to know it

Dickinson dramatises two different reactions to this unspoken piece of information, dismissed so emphatically by the isolated and (consequently) emphasised ‘no’: her letter would ‘quibble’ with the knowledge – a verb suggesting a minor or slight objection, whilst the letter’s male recipient would find ‘His Heart’ entirely ‘split’ by it: clearly a far more serious reaction to this unarticulated fact. Ostensibly ‘split’ seems an entirely negative verb: what Dickinson wishes to tell this man would seemingly break his heart in two, and yet comparison to Dickinson’s other work may suggest otherwise: “Split the Lark”, she writes, “and you’ll find the music / bulb after bulb in silver rolled”.

Perhaps it is too convenient – although it is tempting and useful – to suggest that the recipient of this letter may be Charles Wadsworth. Wadsworth was the only man Dickinson ever loved, and yet, as James Reeves notes, this was a ‘hopeless and consuming passion’: he was married; a vicar; and eventually moved thousands of miles away from Dickinson herself in order to pursue his career. Nevertheless, this would certainly explain some of the poem’s ambiguities: there is little doubt that Dickinson would need to send a letter to him rather than visit herself, and also that knowledge of her love for him may well ‘split’ his heart between loyalty to his wife and profession, and affection (she may hope) for Dickinson herself.

This biographical detail is also useful for explaining the poem’s final stanza, which deals with the eventual completion of the letter and the intensely private Dickinson’s final decision to ‘hid[e]’ rather than send it. That she laboured over – though at least partly enjoyed - the content of the letter is indicated by her statement that ‘night finished before we finished’, the repetition of ‘finished’ and anaphora of ‘and’ in lines two and three of this stanza creating that sense of a drawn out process, so much so that the letter – in a hyperbolic personification – ‘begged’ to be ‘ended’. That it is the letter that wishes to end and not Dickinson is significant in illustrating her own enjoyment in this process of communication. Even the ‘clock’ that reminds Dickinson of impending ‘day’ appears ‘old’ she has spent so long perfecting the letter’s content.

In a characteristically compressed line Dickinson then instructs the letter to ‘tell him how she sealed you, cautious!’: this is not, however, what Byron (2000) would call an ‘unrecoverable deletion’ – the reader can fairly simply reconstruct the idea that Dickinson sealed the letter ‘cautious[ly]’ or ‘[with] caution’. This is also supported by the fact that she decides to ‘hid[e]’ the letter, at least ‘until tomorrow’. There is clearly something in its content – presumably ‘the page she didn’t write’, the unnamed ‘verb’ and ‘pronoun’ that she doesn’t with ‘him’ to know – that Dickinson hopes to conceal, yet simultaneously hopes to communicate: note that it is merely ‘until tomorrow’ that the letter is hidden, not permanently. In many ways, this is a poem about implied meaning and the existence of subtext: even though Dickinson has left a ‘page’, ‘verb’ and ‘pronoun’ out of her letter she remains aware, wary even, that they may be deduced or inferred through the words that she did write in their stead.

Interestingly, Dickinson ends the poem imagining the letter gesturing ‘coquette’ and ‘shaking’ its ‘head’, refusing to communicate its content or subtext. This playful, flirtatious imagery contrasts with the apparent severity of the letter’s words which take considerable ‘work’ and time, consequently leaving the poem on the same fun loving note with which it started. It is as though Dickinson projects her own emotions onto the letter, just as she projects her own emotions onto the personified shadowy and breathless landscape in ‘A Certain Slant’. In the end, it appears that coquettish flirtation may be the preferable strategy to a heartfelt revelation of a ‘page’ or ‘verb’ or ‘pronoun’ so profound they are left entirely unnameable in both the letter itself and the lyric its composition and concealment appear to have inspired.