Broken Friendship
Emily Dickinson never felt the pinch of being “ghosted” online, but she agonized over the retreat of her friend, Susan Gilbert, whom she loved with passionate devotion. It happens sometimes that the love of one friend for another, cannot be reciprocated. In Susan’s case, to be loved so fiercely was overwhelming. Without Susan as a singular place to contain her love, a bereft Emily writes, “My heart goes wandering round, and calls for Susie.”
She also asserts, “The heart knows what it wants, or else it doesn’t care.” There was Susan, not gone, “But Remoteness traveled / On her face and tongue.” Her friend is now ungraspable because she traverses a “Latitudeless Place”. Which is a way of saying Susan can’t be found anywhere on a map, or reached by any means.
Dickinson’s poem succinctly captures the desperation of a broken heart, but also a stalwart resolution. In the last stanza (where a resolution to the problem presented in a poem usually occurs), Emily acknowledges the excess of her investment in such an extreme emotional attachment: “Nature took the Day / I had paid so much for.” She also sees how impoverished she would be to continue in the idolization of her friend. Perhaps she realized, too, that what was best for Susan was to free her from an untenable idealization. And what was best for herself, or anyone in similar clutches of affection, was to calm the heart, quiet its demands, and be free of the all-consuming ring of passion’s hungry fire.
Have you had to let go an attachment to another person, as a decision based on what was good for both of you?
