Just me fangirling over Emily Dickinson's letters to Susan Gilbert

Just a bit of me crying over some letters and poetry

Okay, so I'm not gonna go into their history in too much detail because I'm some Wattpad nobody who really doesn't have a place talking about history. I am gonna rant and reference some of her letters and poems tho, because I need to vent. Also, I'm just going into the gay shit.

We're gonna start with a poem. 

Poem 587, Empty My Heart, Of Thee

Empty my Heart, of Thee -

Its single Artery - 

Begin, and leave Thee out - 

Simply Extinction's Date - 

Much Billow hath the Sea - 

One Baltic - They -

Subtract Thyself, in play 

And not enough of me 

Is left - to put away -

"Myself" meant Thee - 

Erase the Root - no Tree - 

Thee - then - no me - 

The Heavens stripped - 

Eternity's vast pocket, picked - 

So, this poem's obviously about how she feels that without the one she loves, she would be nothing. Without them (and by that I mean her), she might as well be dead. Her love is the root to her tree and is her heart's single artery. 

When I first read it, I kinda took the mention of a heart's artery to mean that the person she's speaking about is the only one in her heart. They are its single artery.

Now, this thought reminded me of a letter she sent to Susan, where she wrote:

"Susie, forgive me Darling, for every word I say - my heart is full of you, none other than you in my thoughts..." 

It reminded me of that line in particular but holy shit I had forgotten how gay the next bit is. She straight up wrote this:

"..yet when I seek to say to you something not for the world, words fail me; if you were here, and Oh that you were, my Susie, we need not talk at all, our eyes would whisper for us, and your hand fast in mine, we would not ask for language." 

She ends this letter with these two very gay sentences:

"Now farewell, Susie, and Vinnie sends her love, and mother her's, and I add a kiss, shyly, lest there is somebody there!! Dont let them see, will you Susie?"

Now that's some gay shit. 

In another letter from the same year, the language thing pops up again in the same, spectacularly gay way. 

"So near I seem to you, that I disdain this pen, and wait for a warmer language." 

Earlier in the same letter, she compares waiting for Susan to come home to waiting for a lover to come home. Pretty gay, if you ask me.

"Why, Susie, it seems to me as if my absent Lover was coming home so soon - and my heart must be so busy, making ready for him."