https://www.gazettenet.com/my-turn-caine-Emily-44287421
By ROSEMARY CAINE
Published: 12/30/2021
Guest Columnist Rosemary Caine: Finding inspiration in Emily Dickinson and her Irish maid, Margaret Maher
No algorithm for an Irish accent , Siri types in “The Calcification of Emily Dickinson.” No fear of that.
She who lived in self-orchestrated obscurity, hidden away in the prominent house on Main Street in Amherst, is more famous than ever.
Films, books, biographies, and recently Apple’s ”Dickinson” all seek to parse her life and poetry. All the costumes and related materials, scripts, edits and director’s notes have been donated to the Emily Dickinson Museum, guaranteeing renewed interest in the reclusive poet.
I stumbled on the arc of a story written and researched by the San Francisco writer Aife Murray, “Maid as Muse,” which focuses on the servants of the household — lives in the shadows of their betters, the elite Dickinsons. A risky business, yet another take on the iconic poet, I decided to enter through the servants’ quarters and attach myself to the apron strings of Margaret Maher, a maid from Tipperary, Ireland, her story and the relationship to the Dickinson family, especially Emily.
Maher had all the characteristics of the kind of Wilde Irish Woman I like to see on stage. Given the anti-Irish sentiment in the house, Margaret by dint of her industrious and spirited nature, ultimately earned the respect of the Puritan Dickinsons.
Aife Murray, in “Maid as Muse,” makes the case that the secretive Emily, hiding poems in Margaret’s trunk, gave instructions that they were to be burned upon her death. Margaret had a different take on poem burning. Herself a bit of a poet, she would do no such thing.
She came from the tradition of the Bard. Poets counted more than kings and the last of them, Brian Boru, died in 1014 after getting rid of the Danes, descendants of the Vikings. It was a long time since the Irish had royalty but they had poets galore.
Presumptuous maybe, but the genus of the idea prompted by Aife’s book and a magnetic draw to Margaret, a footnote in the Dickinson Archipelago, got me absorbed and enthralled. Aife’s mission, akin to my own, pull Margaret out of the scullery, tell her story and prevent her erasure from the multiplying myths of Emily Dickinson.
Where to start with 1,800 poems?
I started reading them. I chose a few. They’ve become songs. I wouldn’t be the first to dare and hardly the last.
Then when I was living in Emily’s town, visiting Irish friends were no strangers to poetry. In our time, it was part of an elementary and secondary school education, rote memorization of Keats, Shelley, Longfellow and W.B. Yeats, but no Emily Dickinson that I can remember.
Now she is taught in Ireland, Sweden, Denmark, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, globally acclaimed, she’s almost competing with Yeats in Ireland where the story of her withdrawal from the world, her spinster status reluctance to publish adds to her mystique. What voyeur’s curiosity wants us prying and looking for answers to the mystery of Emily. Scholars have no time or patience with that, they just focus on her prolific output, the almost 2,000 poems.
Surely that is enough, but it isn’t, judging by the recent appearance of Emily in so many leaps forward to contemporary culture. She is another new star of screen, stage and radio.
Emily as a feminist, Emily as a lesbian, Emily as a mistress, Emily as a baker, Emily a misunderstood bon vivant.
Really?
Will there be knockoffs of the famous white dress?
The Gúna Bán, which keeps her pure and plain, the white dress that hides her pain, her Gúna Bán.
Emily, An File, the Irish word for poet.
The story of Margaret Maher and Emily is most alive to me in the kitchen where domestic intimacy transcends the mistress servant relationship.
Emily the baker, more famous for a few cakes and pies than 1,800 poems.
That gravitas of genius should have struck terror in an any impostor’s heart. But Margaret spurred me on.
In writing this performance piece, enthusiasm, presumption, poetic license and imagination leap over scholarship.
I resolved to put the doubting imposter posture behind me and in doing so produced not so much a magnum opus to show for my time in COVID but at least a piece of work where my Wilde Irish Women and Men and an audience will be the judge of Margaret Maher and “The Celtification of Emily Dickinson.”
When I’m hammering out a song on the piano like Gún Bán, Irish for White Dress, the sacrosanct nature of her legacy gives way and somehow melts into the focus that results in a song.
Out of thin air a melody lands in my fingers and lyrics appear.
Margaret starches, washes, irons her Gúna Bán.
A dress of pure and simple lawn, her Gúna Bán.
I see the ironing board on the stage, a duet dialogue.
As Margaret irons, she sings,
Miss Emily!
Please take a break, you’ve poems to write, cakes to bake.
Emily sings
She will not see me put upon, with too much toil and trouble
She takes on all the major tasks and leaves me time to stay awake
and write and dream and fantasize about the world and God and birds, about the world and God and birds and life.
Written by Rosemary Caine, a musician who lives in Greenfield, and with a lot of help from Emily. “Margaret Maher and The Celtification Of Emily Dickinson” will have its maiden voyage at Hawks & Reed in fall 2022. Caine is a member of the Young@Heart Chorus.