Anne Gilchrist to Walt Whitman, 31 January 1873
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50 Marquis Road
Camden Sq. London
Jan. 31/73
Dearest Friend,
Shall you never find it in your heart to say a kind word to me again? or a word of some sort? Surely I must
have written what displeased you very much that you should turn away from me as the tone of your last letter
& the ten months' silence which have followed seem
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to express to me with such emphasis. But if so, tell me of it, tell me how—with perfect candour. I am
worthy of that—a willing learner & striver; not afraid of the pain of looking my own faults &
shortcomings steadily in the face. Or it may be my words have led you to do me some kind of injustice in
thought,—& then I could defend myself. But if it is simply that
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you are preoccupied, too busy—perhaps very eagerly beset by hundreds like myself whose hearts are so
drawn out of their breasts by your Poems that they cannot rest without striving, some way or other, to draw
near to you personally—then write once more & tell me so & I will learn to be content. But please
let it be a letter just like the first three you wrote: & do not fear that I shall take it
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to mean anything it doesn't mean. I shall never do that again, though it was natural enough at first, with the
deep unquestioning belief I had that I did but answer a call; that I not only might, but ought, on pain of being
untrue to the greatest, sweetest instincts & aspirations of my own soul, to answer it with all my heart &
strength & life. I say to myself, I say to you as I did in my first letters This voice that has come to me
from over the Atlantic is the one
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divine voice that has penetrated to my soul: is the utterance of a nature that sends out life giving warmth &
light to my inward self as actually as the Sun does to my body, & draws me to it and shapes & shall shape
my course just as the Sun shapes the Earth's. "Interlocked in a vast similitude"1
indeed are these inner & outer truths of our lives. It may be that this shaping of my life course
toward you will have to be all inward
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that to feed upon your words till they pass into the very substance & action of my Soul is all that will be given
to me, & the grateful yearning tender love growing ever deeper & stronger out of that will have to go dumb
& actionless all my days here. But I can wait long, wait patiently; know well, realize more & clearly indeed that
this wingless, clouded, half developed soul of me has a long, long novitiate to live through before it can
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meet & answer yours on equal terms so as fully to satisfy you, to be in very truth & deed a dear
Friend, a chosen companion, a source of joy to you as you of light & life to me. But that is what I
will live & die hoping & striving for. That covers and includes all the aspirations all the high
hopes I am capable of. And were I to fall away from
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this belief it would be a fall into utter blackness & despair, as one for whom the Sun in Heaven is
blotted out.
Correspondent:
Anne Burrows Gilchrist
(1828–1885) was the author of one of the first significant pieces of
criticism on Leaves of Grass, titled "A Woman's Estimate
of Walt Whitman (From Late Letters by an English Lady to W. M. Rossetti)," The Radical 7 (May 1870), 345–59. Gilchrist's long
correspondence with Whitman indicates that she had fallen in love with the poet
after reading his work; when the pair met in 1876 when she moved to
Philadelphia, Whitman never fully returned her affection, although their
friendship deepened after that meeting. For more information on their
relationship, see Marion Walker Alcaro, "Gilchrist, Anne Burrows (1828–1885)," Walt
Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New
York: Garland Publishing, 1998).
Notes
- 1. Gilchrist is referring to Whitman's poem "On the Beach at Night Alone." [back]