Emily Dickinson at her finest
 

We like March, his shoes are purple,
He is new and high;
Makes he mud for dog and peddler,
Makes the forest dry;
Knows the adder’s tongue his coming,
And begets her spot.
Stands the sun so close and mighty
That our minds are hot.
News is he of all the others;
Bold it were to die
With the blue-birds buccaneering
In his British sky.

Thanks, Tim. It’s a lovely tribute to March. I prefer it as she wrote it:

We like March - his Shoes are Purple,
He is new and high -
Makes he Mud for Dog and Peddler,
Makes the Forest dry –

Knows the Adder’s Tongue his coming
And begets her Spot.
Stands the Sun so close and mighty
That our Minds are hot.

News is he of all the others -
Bold it were to die
With the Blue Birds buccaneering
On his British Sky –

Franklin 1194

The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition
by Emily Dickinson and R. W. Franklin | Oct 28, 2005

Hi RC--

I lifted it from Bartleby's, which subtracts the dashes and the capitalizations and deletes the space between the stanzas. I know I'm in the minority here, but I think that few poets of equal stature were more in need of an editor than Emily Dickinson. But in the this case the poem's brilliance is hardly dimmed in either version. As you say, it's a lovely tribute to March, "With the blue birds buccaneering/In his British sky," a line so characteristic of her at her exuberant best.

Here are two manuscript versions, which are about as "as she wrote it" as you can get.

Version 1 (link is to Page 1, use arrows to see verso and Page 2 + verso)
[S2L1 "Adder tongue", S3L3 "exercising"]

Version 2 (Page 2 only, no image available for Page 1)
[S3L3 "buccaneering"]

Here's Todd's "fair copy" version:

Fair copy (Page 1 of 1)
[S2L1 "Adders tongue", S3L3 "buccaneering"]

Tim, Bartleby's, as much as I love it, shouldn't do that. Especially since the white spaces between stanzas are structural and parts of a poem's meaning. But I guess they "prefer not to" leave well enough alone.

Added: The spaces are also a mnemonic since the quatrain is by miles the most frequent and remembered poetic form (ask any kid repeating rhymes).

I very much don't like the edited versions of her work. I have the Franklin and can read the Johnson but that is it. I hate everything that attempts to smooth out her work. The whole Belle of Amherst BS.

I have to agree. In fact, Dickinson for me is the poet least in need of an editer, especially many of the male ones that took over her poetry after she died. For me, Dickinson's brilliance always lay in her strangeness, and I thought the more coherent or ordinary nature poems the most boring. This, for me, is middle-grade, better than some, but not as good by far as poems such as:

I tried to think a lonelier Thing
Than any I had seen -
Some Polar Expiation - An Omen in the Bone
Of Death’s tremendous nearness -
I probed Retrieveless things5
My Duplicate - to borrow -
A Haggard comfort springs
From the belief that Somewhere -
Within the Clutch of Thought -
There dwells one other Creature10
Of Heavenly Love - forgot -
I plucked at our Partition -
As One should pry the Walls -
Between Himself - and Horror’s Twin -
Within Opposing Cells -15
I almost strove to clasp his Hand,
Such Luxury - it grew -
That as Myself - could pity Him -
Perhaps he - pitied me -
or, more concretely:

A Clock stopped -
Not the Mantel’s -
Geneva’s farthest skill
Cant put the puppet bowing -
That just now dangled still -5
An awe came on the Trinket!
The Figures hunched - with pain -
Then quivered out of Decimals -
Into Degreeless noon -
It will not stir for Doctor’s -10
This Pendulum of snow -
The Shopman importunes it -
While cool - concernless No -
Nods from the Gilded pointers -
Nods from the Seconds slim -15
Decades of Arrogance between
The Dial life -
And Him -

Dickinson scholarship is dominated by what I call the originalists, who feel that her poems were bastardized by Mabel Loomis Todd. I am grateful that we have the efforts of Franklin and Thomas Johnson, who worked as preservationists, allowing us to see the poems as Dickinson left them. But I still think of Ms. Todd as her first and best editor. She rescued the poems from oblivion and revised those that, in my opinion, were desperately in need of revision. The caps, the dashes, the off-rhymes are, to me, distractions, flaws that interfere with my enjoyment of the poems. The naked poems were as eccentric as the poet herself, but the eccentricities may have been due to carelessness, the curse of the prolific, rather than some modernist tendency attributed to her.

RC, I agree with you that the stanzas of most poems should be allowed to be free standing, but neither Loomis or Bartleby's eliminated the spaces. I don't have Franklin's variorum edition, but Johnson shows that this poem was left to us as a single stanza. Julie Steiner links to photocopies of the original versions, which indicate that Dickinson wrote the poem as a unit, although she had constraints of space and her handwriting seems to be hasty if not buccaneering.

I mean this with as much respect as I can muster, but smoothing out the way she wrote her poems in her own hand in order to make them easier to read is like going back and editing Shakespeare into prose paragraphs. It's the same concept. We find Shakespeare's work too difficult to understand and troublesome in iambics so we turn it into prose. What a travesty to go back and take any artists' work and make it more amenable. God save us from straining a little to meet the artist where he or she wants to be met. If you want amenable read light verse. Dickinson was and is not in desperate need of revision. The challenge is for the reader to realize this and to keep working until they see it or stop reading. Don't go back and take the highly original work of possibly America's greatest poet and "fix it." If she'd wanted it to be read like everyone else's poetry she was perfectly capable of changing it to suit current taste. She was offered the opportunity but, like any real artist, she refused to do so. I do wonder if the fact she was a sheltered woman of the upper-middle class is the reason so many people try to deny the reality that she was an avant-garde poet. One of the first to kick over what nineteenth-century poetry had turned into? I know of no one who is smoothing out Whitman and it isn't only because he self-published his book. She was not the Belle of Amherst. She was the she-wolf of the wild and original.

Also, it must be pointed out that Dickinson's reputation before Johnson did his work was middling at best. It wasn't until a gifted and awestruck editor turned his attention to restoring her work to the original that she exploded in reputation and influence. There is a reason for that. Todd's edits turned her into a conventional poet, no different than dozens. It wasn't until we saw Dickinson herself that she was recognized for her genius.

If you want your art dumbed down and more readily digestible, Marvel has an entire cinematic universe you can spend ages exploring. Leave Dickinson alone.

Try listening to an audiobook edition of her poetry. I doubt you will care whether the recording is based on a text using this punctuation arrangement or that one, as long as what really matters - the poetry- comes through strongly and clearly.

By contrast, I think the entire poem, and not an amputated portion of it, is the poetry.

Good point, Kevin. What matters is the sound in the ear, not the appearance on the page. In the audiobook I have, read beautifully by Marianne Fraulo, all of Dickinson's tics and quirks are of little consequence.

Very silly to suggest that Dickinson's "tics and quirks" (a strange choice of phrase to use to refer to her deliberate artistic choices, but then fear does strange things to people) play no role in determining how her poems should be read!

Yes, after which I'll listen to an audiobook of Apollinaire's caligrams, safe in the knowledge that I have missed nothing.

I'm going to have to side with the majority here, a critic once stated that how we view Dickinson depends on the age, from the editing (and yes, actually, the editing went further than punctuation, to actual word choice, and yes, actually, since punctuation dictates how a poem is to be read out loud, the changing of said punctuation would change the audible attributes of that poem) and dumbing-down of her brilliant modernist talents in the nineteenth to early twentieth century, to the great focus on visual experimentation lead by Sarah Howe and others in the late twentieth and twenty-first. Here, oddly, I am happy to be of my age, and would rather think much of an artist than try to denigrate her "tics" and "quirks" as accidental. In fact, they are far from that. That is why I think your choice of this poem is poor for Dickinson "at her finest", most half-decent nineteenth-century poets could manage a verse almost as good; she's at her finest with her half-rhymes, with her brilliantly strange inventiveness, as in the poems I posted above, she is greater, I think, even than Gerard Manley Hopkins, with his "tics and quirks", let alone Whitman. In fact, I find much of Whitman boringly positive, Dickinson is the opposite. She is boisterous, but boisterously negative, obsessed with death and decay. For me, she is even greater than Keats in that regard, for she is the much more restlessly experimental of the great poets. I might, on an ambitious day, compare her to Shakespeare; Bloom did it. So no, I'm not sure this is her "at her finest", though it is her at her "very good".

When I read her I hear John Clare.

Really? Crikey. I can understand how there are loads of intersections/similarities in all kinds of dimensions, but they've always been two very distinct voices for me, for what it's worth.

I wonder what AI will bring to the debate (which for me replicates a different debate about biographical/ verging on hagiographical understandings of poetry).

Here's an animation of an Emily Dickinson photograph posted recently on social media.

All those representations, and people wanting to relate to them in different ways. It's a bewilderbeast, growing more tentacular-spectacular by the day.

Sarah-Jane

I love JC. And EmilyD also. I don’t mean their voices are the same.
it’s as if there are echoes of others in the sounds. Maybe it’s a Victorian
Sensibility thing, not sure.

I know she was a big Shakespeare-holic, certainly writing at a time when you
could get away with much more metaphysics than you can today.

Hardy in Larkin also. Yeats within Heaney. Not the same voices,
but when you hear it you think, yep, that’s a subtle thing that the
Poet has trained into the voice, consciously or not.

Clare is bloody great though. Not infallible, but pretty awesome
a lot of the time, as is ED.

Emily Brontë loved writing so much she came back to life as Emily Dickinson.

I went back to both this morning - I think it's just people reading things differently. I can see what you mean, but although I like some of Clare's work, it always strikes me as a bit overblown, a bit 'easily' bucolic. A bit self-obsessed. I read ED as the opposite - precisely defined, external, observant/reflective. Having said that, Clare's 'I am' is amazing - the end of it the kind of writing that knocks you over.

I don't know anything about any of this, though - my knowledge very subjective. I'd like to see a surreal alt-classification of poetry which locates people through random themes, like how often they used the word 'moth', ate cake, wrote on a Tuesday or had an interest in map-making.

Sarah-Jane

Yep, everything is subjective. I’ve never thought of JC as self-obsessed tho.
touched, as my gran used to say. Certainly by the end of his life, totally
schizophrenic. hearing voices and seeing visions and all that. Dickinson
became a recluse sadly, agoraphobic, but not as far off the rails as Clare.

What I really mean was... their sense of wonder. Which all major poets
share. The sensibilities of which are usually affected by the times they
live in. Dickinson has it spades, as does Clare. An almost supernatural
desire to pare things down to their essence, as if not to get in the way
of beauty. Brevity as an art form is a wondrous thing. She often does
more in 4 lines than most do in 50.

Sarah-Jane, your description of ED as "external" is interesting to me since I always loved her for being precisely the opposite. It seems to me that almost all her poems take place in her mind. She is all about describing what it's like to be inside her own head, and by extension what it's like for anyone to be inside their own head. Her poems (it seems to me) are largely about introspection. She thought about her own thoughts and what it was like to be thinking them, and she tried very hard (and often succeeded) to draw us a little schematic of precisely what the thinking was like. I think she did this to an extent that hadn't previously been seen in poetry. It's why her poems are so hermetic and coded at times, because it's the nature of her subject matter and the challenge she sets herself to reveal what is generally sealed off. You'll notice that she didn't tend to write many poems in which other people appeared. She was her own main character, though without a trace of narcissim, just an earnest sort of exploration of experience. She's sort of the opposite of Whitman in this regard, since Whitman was almost manicly about reaching out to others and didn't tend to delve deep within himself per se.

I tend to agree with Roger and think that is--to beat a dead horse--why it is so important to read her poems as she wrote them. What we see when we read her poems is her mind working and she is often thinking in snaps. There has been much speculation about whether ED had a mental illness, which is something I don't think is necessary to pursue, but she was often focused on how her mind worked and her poems serve as a record. There is more there of course, but it is this inwardness turned external that helps to make her a revolutionary poet and why her reputation was dependent on the restoration of her original poems. I think this also may be why she could remind someone of Clare. We know he was mentally ill and some of his poems have that quality of objectifying how his mind is working. One of the other things I like so much in her poems is how ED clung to nature. She doesn't merely describe nature, she wraps herself around flowers and birds and such with an almost desperate need to hold onto them. A sort of Wordsworth 2.0. It is this intensity that her original poems reveal and is why she is not Bronte reborn but the indicator of where so much twentieth-century poetry would go. I certainly see her all through Berryman's Dream Songs, for example, and in a manner that is not merely influence.

Somewhat relevant: I used the word "March" when I searched for this poem in Amherst's online archive, and retrieved several other poems that mention March (which probably inspired Tim's original post).

Here's another March poem (F1320A). It has "purple" in it, too. The slope behind my house is currently carpeted with the American Southwest's ubiquitous invasive purple filaree (a weed that Dickinson probably didn't know).

Just for my own amusement, I'm going to take the liberty of editing it into quatrains, and getting rid of "and" in S4L1. The Amherst archive doesn't have an image of ED's manuscript, just Todd's "fair copy," so I don't know how ED actually wrote it, but I don't see any reason to depart from her usual ballad stanza presentation in this one.


Dear March - Come in - How glad I am -
I hoped for you before -
Put down your Hat - You must have walked -
How out of Breath you are -

Dear March, how are you, and the Rest -
Did you leave Nature well -
Oh March, Come right upstairs with me -
I have so much to tell -

I got your Letter, and the Birds -
The Maples never knew
That you were coming - I declare -
How Red their Faces grew -

But March, forgive me - All those Hills
You left for me to Hue -
There was no Purple suitable -
You took it all with you -

Who knocks? That April - Lock the Door -
I will not be pursued -
He stayed away a Year to call
When I am occupied -

But trifles look so trivial
As soon as you have come
That blame is just as dear as Praise
And Praise as mere as Blame -


If people want to see it the way it's usually lineated, here's a link.

I'd say that Clare and Dickinson were of nearly equal stature in the Department of Ornithology. Many of their poems about birds are as beautiful as John Audubon's drawings. Going strictly by the numbers, BYU's Emily Dickinson Lexicon, one of my favorite resources, says that ED's poetry has 177 references to "bird" or "birds," not to mention all the references to individual species such as robins, larks, and sparrows. John Clare, not to be outdone, describes about 150 different species in his bird poems, with many species mentioned more than once.

That’s cool. I can imagine a giant venn diagram of where poets
word choices overlap. Is there a list anywhere of what words she
used most often, or is it just a case of searching for individual
words?

The word cloud here looks interesting, Dave.

(Although it immediately occurs to me that "like" can have several meanings, as A.E. Stallings' sestina pointed out.)

There is at least one study, "Emily Dickinson's Poetic Vocabulary," which discusses her favorite words and the words she used most frequently (not the same thing). Access to the online study requires 25 USD or membership in a group or library associated with Cambridge University Press, which may include you. Here's a link:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journ...1A7344CF5F6E69

The BYU Lexicon is free, and it has been invaluable to me. Here's a link to a John Clare Concordance, which doesn't answer your immediate question but, like the Lexicon, is fun for browsing.

http://victorian-studies.net/concordance/clare/

Love this. It makes me read both poets differently, without losing an original sense of them (understanding poets through their biography can sometimes not work for me although it's often interesting).

Audubon is wonderful. For those who aren't aware (I expect most of you will know this), the whole of Birds of America is in the public domain and available as free downloads.

Sarah-Jane

I almost canceled Audubon, however, because he pretty much swindled Keats's brother when he came to the United States. I can't remember the story, but it's recounted in Keats's letters as I recall.

If it's any comfort, Roger, Audubon was bankrupted in the same episode that bankrupted George Keats.

https://dspace.nku.edu/bitstream/han...=1&isAllowed=y

From what you quote, it's still possible that George was right that Audubon knew of the impending reversal when he took George's money, but failed to tell him. If that's true, then Audubon might have swindled George motivated by his own genuine financial desperation, but it was still a swindle. The fact that stealing George's money didn't rescue him from bankrupcy doesn't excuse bringing George down with him.

Of course the lamentable outcome on George (and his siblings) was the same, regardless of Audubon's intentions, and regardless of Audubon's subsequent dire straits.

I mentioned Audubon's ruination only because you seemed to feel that Audubon hadn't been adequately punished for this incident during his lifetime, so I thought schadenfreude might salve your sense of justice a bit. I stand corrected.

If Audubon was already in trouble with his creditors, as he seems to have been, he may well have been eager to try to save his own bacon with George's (and his siblings') money. But that doesn't necessarily mean that he understood that the venture was doomed at that point.

In my experience, most people who evangelize their friends into get-rich-quick schemes actually believe their own hyped assessments of an investment opportunity's prospects. They honestly think they are doing their friends a favor (that just happens to be mutually beneficial). They tend to have a gambler mentality that remains in denial that the risks might outweigh the reward, until reality comes crashing down on them.

By the way, after (and perhaps because of?) the failure of the Henderson steamboat venture, Audubon's brother-in-law (Thomas Bakewell), persuaded George to work in his sawmill in Louisville, and later to invest in it. And also to invest in yet another steamboat venture, which also failed, leaving George on the hook to pay off Bakewell's debts. But the sawmill partnership seems to have been what put George on more solid financial footing.

I don't take sides. I give George points only for being John's brother, though he wasn't always a particularly good one, and I deduct points for his eventually owning a few slaves. It's just fascinating to see the connection between historical figures that one wouldn't necessarily expect had anything to do with one another.

I know, fascinating, right? Then again, there were a LOT fewer people on the planet back then, so the chances that famous contemporaries would have crossed paths were significantly higher than they are now.

(The sawmill also used slave labor.)

I feel slightly better now about occasionally decapitating his birds and repurposing them.

(honestly, I did feel bad about it, the drawings are so beautiful).

Sarah-Jane

Let's get metaphysical:

Great streets of silence led away
To neighborhoods of pause;
Here was no notice, no dissent,
No universe, no laws.

There is no better quatrain in the language. There are many as good but none better.

Lovely quote for an early morning, too. Thank-you!

just wanted to say thanks to everyone for keeping this thread
going. and for those ED resources, which will come in v.handy.
cheers. and Tim that quatrain is fab. i'm still interested in who
her influences were and what books she had. i'd also be interested
in everyones' top 20 quatrains, Dickinson or not. one of mine,
by William Soutar..



End is in beginning;
And in beginning end;
Death is not loss, nor life winning,
but each and to each is friend.

Interesting poem! But I think the author of this plagiarized Emily Dickinson. Compare to this great poem of hers:

Great Streets of silence led away
To Neighborhoods of Pause –
Here was no Notice – no Dissent
No Universe – no Laws –

By Clocks, 'twas Morning, and for Night
The Bells at Distance called –
But Epoch had no basis here
For Period exhaled.

Afraid to say I think Dickinson's is far superior!