#Dickinson Season 3 Ending Explained: Imagination Is Freedom

To fans’ inevitable dismay, “This Was A Poet -” doesn’t actually contain much interaction between Emily and Sue. That’s because the episode focuses on Emily’s period of isolated creativity, which was an extended era of the poet’s real life. Sue still goes to bat for Emily when Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Gabriel Ebert) arrives to meet her, though. The man, who is Emily’s pen pal and a major fan of her work, is tasked with waiting for her to come down from her room. Sue works hard to make sure he’s comfortable as he waits, because she knows how vital he could be to advancing Emily’s career.

So far, we’ve mostly seen Higginson with the 1st South Carolina Volunteer Infantry Regiment, an historic military unit composed of escaped slaves. After the regiment’s triumph, he leaves the Dickinsons’ former employee, Henry (Chinaza Uche), in charge. It makes sense to maneuver Higginson to the Dickinsons’ part of the woods for the last episode. His presence makes the Dickinson family genuinely think about their daughter as a public artist for the first time. He calls her a genius and wants to know everything about her, and the family is happy to oblige by snitching on her for talking to bees and generally being a bit of a weirdo.

The conversation Higginson inspires also leads to one of the show’s most beautiful moments, which unexpectedly comes from the family maid, Maggie (Darlene Hunt). The series has never shied away from Emily’s complicated legacy as a privileged white northern woman living through the Civil War, but Maggie puts Emily’s poetic purpose into an even grander context that moves some of the family to tears:

“You know, it used to be said in the old Irish wars that the clans had an agreement. That no matter how bloody the war became, no matter how many were slaughtered, that they should always spare the poets. Don’t kill the poets, they’d say. Because the poets had to be left to tell the story.”