Ranunculus

I feel an affinity toward you, Emily. The Myth, the Lady in White, the poet.

Some necessary research on your basic history led me to a site that claimed to hold your biography and I found myself enthralled by you. It is foremost the fact that you were content not to be published or seek to be widely read during your lifetime, that you wrote because it brought you joy. Secondly that you were often baking, and excelled at it. Thirdly that you tended to a garden that became greatly admired in Amherst. Well done, Emily.

Those reasons, and more: because you bravely wrote directly to a contributor of the Atlantic Monthly to inquire his opinion of your talents, and because of, later, the way you described yourself in a letter to Mr. Higginson. Because you were close with your family, that you became reclusive but not bitter, ill but not forlorn, not always. You are both morbid and dainty in your writing, capturing at once the marriage of a finite sense of life and a peculiar, eternal longevity, too. What I read from others and what I read from you seem to tell a story of a woman taunted by the deaths of those she loved, one whose reclusive nature did not yield anger but rather introspection and a curious sense of humor.

I admire that you do not hold true to a form in your style, that it is rumored you did strange things (like speak to people through doorways instead of face to face), that you requested your coffin be carried, not driven, through the buttercups to your gravesite. The very request embodies you; poetic, serene, and macabre.