Dickinson, Thomas Gilbert
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obituary in the Amherst Record describes a child wise and giving beyond his years, self-reliant, gentle, and sensitive, with whom adults conversed for their own pleasure (Sewall, Life, I, 125). Emily’s “alliance” with the little boy is demonstrated by an episode in which a kindergarten teacher rebuked him for “lying” about an imaginary beautiful white calf and made him cry. His indignant aunt “besought them one and all to come to her, she would show them! The white calf was grazing up in her attic at that very moment!” (“Country Girl,” 64–65, cited in Habegger, 548.). On the night he died, she rushed to be with him—the first time in 15 years she had set foot in The EVERGREENS. Later, she would tell ELIZABETH LUNA CHAPIN HOLLAND: “Open the Door, open the Door, they are waiting for me,” was Gilbert’s sweet command in delirium. Who were waiting for him, all we possess we would give to know—Anguish at last opened it, and he ran to the little Grave at his Grandparents’ feet—All this and more, though is there more? More than Love and Death? Then tell me it’s name! (L 873, late 1883).
Afterward, as her sister LAVINIA reported, “Emily received a nervous shock the night Gilbert died & was alarmingly ill for weeks” (cited in Sewall, Life, I, 146). Austin was in a suicidal despair for months, recovering his lease on life only through embarking on a passionate affair with MABEL LOOMIS TODD. The boy’s mother, Susan, “would see no one, would not even be driven through the village for more than a year” (Bianchi, “Country Girl,” 120). Sewall speculates that, had he lived, “this remarkable child might have brought about some reconciliation between his parents” as well as between Emily and Susan (Life, I, 204). Emily did send the bereaved mother exquisite letters of “condolence,” in which she celebrates the lost child. In them she makes “no reference to God and interprets Gib’s death as his own transcendent achievement” (Habegger, My Wars, 617). Attempting to transform tragedy into victory, she evokes Gib as Ajax, the classical hero known for his strength. Gilbert rejoiced in Secrets— His life was panting with them. . . .
Thomas Gilbert (“Gib”) Dickinson, son of Austin and Susan Dickinson, Emily’s beloved nephew, at about six years old. His sudden death of typhoid fever at age eight, in early October 1883, was a devastating blow to the family. (By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University)
He knew no niggard moment—His life was full of Boon . . . No crescent was this Creature—He traveled from the Full— Such soar, but never set— I see him in the Star, and meet his sweet velocity in everything that flies . . . Without a speculation, our little Ajax spans the whole. . . . (L 886)
The letter ends with the poem, “Pass to thy Rendezvous of Light” (Fr 1624). A year after the boy’s death, in a letter to Sue, she enclosed a poem (Fr 1666), which begins, “Some Arrows slay but whom they strike—/ But this slew all but him . . .” After Gib’s death, she continued to write notes to his little friends. For the poet, who had lost her