The Witch's Eye

Fourth in a series: documents written but never handed over.

Emily Dickinson published ten poems while she was alive. She wrote about eighteen hundred.

She sewed the rest into little booklets by hand, kept in a locked chest. When she died, her sister Lavinia found them.

Emily left one instruction: burn the letters. Lavinia did, almost all. She said nothing about the poems. No name, no plan. The thing she spent her life making was the one thing she couldn't give an order about.

Lavinia read them and knew. She pushed for years to print them; the first collection appeared in 1890, four years after she died.

Editors smoothed them: dashes fixed, grammar corrected. The poems the world read for sixty-five years were not quite hers. Only in 1955 did anyone return to the manuscripts.

For most of a century, the truest thing she made reached people wearing somebody else's clothes.

That's what people hand me. The one you're sure isn't good enough, isn't finished. Hand it over and it can be read wrong; keep it and it reaches no one.

She kept it. Fine. But a chest with no name is how your best work comes out in someone else's handwriting.

Open yours. The person it's for might not exist yet. That's no reason to leave it in the dark.