So I started April, as I said, with two divergent paths: I decided to accept the challenge from the Academy of American Poets to write a poem a day, and I decided to run Emily Dickinson to ground, to really understand her, to get her under my skin. Turns out that I would need to get under her skin. So I decided, about halfway through the month, to focus on the poem a day and return to Dickinson in May.
In the meantime, Cristanne Miller, my guide in exploring Dickinson’s grammar[i], published her reader’s edition of the complete poems of Dickinson.[ii] Since I have been using R. W. Franklin’s “Reading edition” of The poems of Emily Dickinson,[iii] I was curious about the differences between the two, a curiosity only heightened by her choice of a title, Emily Dickinson’s poems, as she preserved them. Her thesis is that we should be able to read the poems as Dickinson preserved the ones she kept, and look at the others with a clear understanding of how she regarded them herself.
As I started reading Emily Dickinson’s poems, as she preserved them I was struck by the kind of random thought that drives this blog, in response to the opening words of her Introduction:
Emily Dickinson did not see any of her almost 1,800 poems through the process of publication, but she did copy more than 1,100 poems in fair hand onto folded sheets of stationery, binding the majority of the sheets into the booklets Dickinson scholars call fascicles. This is the first edition of Dickinson’s poems to present her fascicle and unbound-sheet poems in the order in which she copied them, in easily readable form.[iv]
Reading that, I thought, “So, she didn’t see any of her poems through publication, but at least 10 were published in her lifetime. Which ones were they, and did that experience sour her on publication?” A quick look at the list of those poems, on the website of the Emily Dickinson Museum, and I was drawn in.
The first one was published on 20 February1852, when Dickinson was 21 years old, under the title “St Valentine — ‘52”. It is a youthful jeu d’esprit, and presented by Miller, as far as I can tell, in the only extant text — as published in the Springfield Daily Republican:
Sic transit gloria mundi,
“How doth the busy bee,”
Dum vivamus vivamus,
I stay mine enemy! —
Oh veni, vidi, vici!
Oh caput cap-a-pie!
And oh “memento mori”
When I am far from thee
Hurrah for Peter Parley
Hurrah for Daniel Boone
Three cheers, sir, for the gentleman
Who first observed the moon —
Peter put up the sunshine!
Pattie arrange the stars
Tell Luna, tea is waiting,
And call your brother Mars —
Put down the apple Adam
And come away with me
So shalt thou have a pippin
From off my father’s tree!
I climb the “Hill of Science”
I “view the landscape o’er”
Such transcendental prospect,
I ne’er beheld before! —
Unto the Legislature
My country bids me go,
I’ll take my india rubbers,
In case the wind should blow.
During my education
It was announced to me
That gravitation, stumbling,
Fell from an apple tree —
The earth upon its axis
Was once supposed to turn
By way of a gymnastic
In honor to the sun —
It was the brave Columbus
A sailing o’er the tide
Who notified the nations
Of where I would reside
Mortality is fatal
Gentility is fine
Rascality, heroic
Insolvency, sublime
Our Fathers being weary
Laid down on Bunker Hill
And though full many a morn’g
Yet they are sleeping still
The trumpet sir, shall wake them,
In streams I see them rise,
Each with a solemn musket
A marching to the skies!
A coward will remain, Sir
Until the fight is done;
But an immortal hero
Will take his hat and run.
Good bye Sir, I am going
My country calleth me
Allow me Sir, at parting
To wipe my weeping e’e
In token of our friendship
Accept this “Bonnie Doon”
And when the hand that plucked it
Hath passed beyond the moon
The memory of my ashes
Will consolation be;
Then farewell Tuscarora,
And farewell Sir, to thee.[v]
Miller divides the poems in her reader’s edition into five sections, in descending order of Dickinson’s apparent efforts to preserve them: “The Fascicles;” “Unbound Sheets” [still in fair copy]; “Loose Poems” [not necessarily in fair copy]; “Poems Transcribed by Others;” and, “Poems Not Retained.” The first two categories contain the more than 1,100 poems she copied in fair hand. The poem above comes from the 5th category, and Miller’s notes indicate how problematic that category, and her efforts, prove to be. Her note on the poem begins “Eudocia Converse copied this poem into her 1848-1853 commonplace book (lost; source text is transcript by Leyda); the error in the Latin phrase in line 3 may be hers, ED’s, or Leyda’s”[vi] and then, after discussing the allusions and quotes, ends: “William Howland’s copy provided the text for the Springfield Daily Republican printing, 20 February 1852, as ‘St Valentine — ‘52’.”[vii]
As far as I can tell, Miller does not say who Eudocia Converse is; she is not included in Miller’s “Glossary of Correspondents”. Leyda is “Jay Leyda, author of The years and hours of Emily Dickinson.”[viii] Miller does identify William Howland, in her “Glossary of Correspondents,” but only as “graduate of Amherst College who studied law with ED’s father”[ix]. To learn who he is and why he had a copy of the poem I had to resort to Habegger, who identifies him in a footnote as one who “helped provoke a wild coming-out” in Dickinson, in which “she wrote a Valentine poem for her sister’s beau, William Howland.”[x] As to how the Springfield Daily Republican got its hands on the poem, Habegger only says, at the end of the footnote, that “The sixty-eight-line extravaganza was sent to the Springfield Daily Republican, which published the ‘amusing medley’ and invited the unknown author to communicate directly in future — which she didn’t.”[xi] Habegger doesn’t identify Eudocia Converse, nor does Lyndall Gordon.[xii]
I hope I have made that clear enough. This was clearly a poem Dickinson tossed off in the spirit of the courting customs of the day, a demonstration of wit and whimsy, and one she did not intend to preserve. But it was her first published poem. I will talk about the others next month, because they include some of her most famous, including “I taste a liquor never brewed,” “These are the days when Birds come back” and “A Narrow fellow in the Grass.”
But hold on, I hear you say: Didn’t you just walk unprepared into another tangle of Dickinson scholarship?
Your turn.
[i] Emily Dickinson : a poet’s grammar / Cristanne Miller. – Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1987.
[ii] Emily Dickinson’s poems, as she preserved them / edited by Cristanne Miller. Cambridge, Mass. : Belknap, 2016.
[iii] The poems of Emily Dickinson. — Reading edition / edited by R. W. Franklin. — Cambridge, Mass. : Belknap, 1999.
[iv] Op. cit., p. 1.
[v] Ibid., pp. 696-8.
[vi] Ibid., p. 793, note 2.
[vii] Ibid.
[viii] Ibid., p. 24. Leyda’s book was published by Yale University Press in 1960.
[ix] Ibid., p. 800.
[x] My wars are laid away in books : the life of Emily Dickinson / Alfred Habegger. – New York : Random House, c2001. The quotes are from p. 246, in the body of the text and in fn. 1.
[xi] Ibid.
[xii] In her Lives like loaded guns : Emily Dickinson and her family’s feuds. She does not confirm William Howland’s status as Susan’s beau, but Thomas H. Johnson confirms that Emily wrote the poem for Howland, and that he retaliated by sending it to the Springfield Daily Republican as a part of a custom for exchanging such extravaganzas of wit, in his Emily Dickinson : an interpretive biography (Cambridge, Mass. : Belknap, 1955), pp. 69-70.