While reading specifically Dickinson's love poems, I found 640J/706F, Dickinson's longest poem, strikingly powerful with its speakers' logical, albeit hypothetical, rejection of a lover. Tracing this poem's publication history further supported the belief that the speaker's choice for "separateness" in this poem and Dickinson's choice of separation from the restrictions of the publishing world are versions of the same resistance. I tracked this poem from Higginson and Todd's 1891 edition to Thomas Johnson's 1955 variorum edition and subject index and finally to Franklin's 1981 Manuscript Books, Fascicle 33, and the facsimile of 640J/706F. I explain Dickinson's and her speaker's choices as they defy expectations of the 19th Century.
In my reprints of sections of the poem, the first column is the poem as it appears in the 1891 Higginson/Todd edition. Variations from the second column, the 1955 Johnson variorum edition, are marked in red. The second column's red marks note the variations from Johnson's text of the poem found in Dickinson's Fascicle 33. 640J/706F is not the most extreme example of editorial license, but representative of expectations.
Decisions on publication were made by men[n.1]. Petrino discusses "'the limits of expression' - the topics for women delimited by editors and critics" (4). Yet Dickinson subverted themes of domesticity, death, Christianity, and sentimentality as her poems presented them. Her "effusions" were both emotional and logical and her working "portfolios" allowed even indecisive control over final drafts. Joanne Dobson argues:
Dickinson participated in a "community of expression" in which women writers used silence, deferral, and coded rhetorical gestures, and responded with her own self-protective linguistic style: her "slant" expressive strategy, non-publication, and frequent use of conventional feminine images allow Dickinson a poetics in which personal disclosure is screened through a series of fail-safe devices designed to allay anxiety about nonconforming articulation (qtd. in Petrino 4).
Though only ten poems were published publicly during Dickinson's lifetime (between 1852 and 1878), Petrino notes Karen Dandurang's claim that "Dickinson was fully aware that her poems were 'going round' the newspapers" (21). It was "not the idea of publication that so disturbed her as the loss of control over her poems once they were in the hands of editors" (Petrino 21). In 1862 she wrote to Higginson requesting his honest opinion[n.2]. "Staunchly accepting the criteria by which women's verse was judged in this era, Higginson was predisposed to rate Dickinson's poems as too delicate and perhaps even abnormal to endorse their publication wholeheartedly" (Petrino 38). In Letter #261 Dickinson writes him with her aversion to print: "I smile when you suggest that I delay 'to publish' - that being foreign to my thought" (Letters 174).
Higginson claimed Dickinson "manifested a 'defiance of form' and 'valued her intent over formal correctness'" (Petrino 39). He eventually backed away from his harsh editorial effort but "only because he deemed her to be unrepentant and lost" (Petrino 39). Poet and "preceptor" continued correspondence as Dickinson resigned herself to non-publication. "The idea that verse should remain private, a convention that kept genteel women from publishing in the newspapers and journals, paradoxically freed women to make themselves known through circulating their manuscripts" (Petrino 36). Adverse to the liberties editors took, Dickinson sought publication elsewhere.
Dickinson's "self-published" poems were the ones sent in correspondences or bound in the forty fascicle sets, countering "the prevailing myth about her supposed isolation as a writer" (Petrino 20). The poems were left to Lavinia Dickinson, and upon her sister's death she relentlessly sought to publish them, first asking Susan Gilbert Dickinson for help. "Two things are certain. All the packets were taken to Sue during the summer of 1886 and remained with her well into the winter" ("Editing" xl) and by February 1887 they were back in Todd's possession. The immense task of organizing the written legacy, spurred on by Lavinia, began in the Todd home[n.3] ("Editing" xli).
Copying the poems without sponsorship, "Mrs. Todd was well enough along with the work by the autumn of 1889 to consult with Higginson on the problem of selection" ("Editing" xliii). His input it was thought, would lend "literary respectability" ("Editing" xlii). The limited manuscripts became further limited by publication standards. After Roberts Brothers became willing to publish, "the creative editing began. Higginson gave attention to the classification and the titles. He selected the rubrics for the sections with an eye to the conventionality that he intended the volume to convey, and grouped the poems in the categories of Life, Love, Nature, Time and Eternity" ("Editing" xlv). Early criticism reinforced his faith in his choice to alter the verse to match conventions. Form and ideas were altered by the editors as they presented a single version of the poem.
The early editors "regularized Dickinson's verse by repunctuating it and eliminating capitals" (Petrino 39). "Giving a 'fitting shape' to a book of poems" notes Elizabeth Petrino, "not only alters the poet's work to conform to current literary standards, but it also authorizes them before they undergo public scrutiny" (31). The editor took the risk of public humiliation, assuming an "ownership" of the work. "From 1820 to 1880, editors who assembled collections of female verse frequently referred to the poems as 'effusions,' or emotional outpourings, which they then 'fathered' by publishing them under their names"(Petrino 6). Higginson and Todd were following publication etiquette, "to give the poetry of Emily Dickinson the sort of finish which the sensibilities of the time were thought to demand" ("Editing" xiii).
Their first (1890) edition of "Poems was a success, and the co-editors began work on a second volume (1891)" ("Publication" 1) in which 640J/706F's was first publicly printed. Surprised by the call for more poems, "Higginson's whole attitude changed" ("Editing" xlvii). He wrote of plans for the second series with a new interest in accuracy: "'Let us alter as little as possible, now that the public ear is opened'" ("Editing" xlvii).
| XII. IN VAIN
I CANNOT live with you,
The sexton keeps the key to,
|
640
I cannot live with You -
The Sexton keeps the Key to -
|
| [1891 Higginson/Todd edition]
Variations from 2nd column marked in red |
[1955 Johnson variorum edition]
Red denotes Fascicle 33 variants |
In this poem the speaker, writing within the expected theme of "domesticity" begins her denial of the lover with a domestic metaphor, deferring responsibility for her rejection with the feigned desire to act on established mores. In the poet's time "the single woman was forced into a controlled abstinence of both her emotional and social self" (Burbick 77). For Dickinson's speakers "[s]ometimes the controllers have social masks, like the "Keeper" and the "Sexton" (Burbick 87). Yet, directing the metaphor and the argument against the lover, the speaker ultimately usurps this control as her own.
A poem of "rejection of a loved one", 640J/706F fits Nancy Walker's identification of how the theme is enacted in language: "Missing a loved one is . . . so ordinary a circumstance that it takes place amid the familiar items of the household" (107). Domestic items become symbols- "Cup" becomes life together, which lies restricted behind the Church's "Shelf", the sanctions of only married women, and is finally "Discarded of the Housewife-", destroyed ironically in the wife's chores. These domestic images ease readers into the speaker's first refusal of conventional womanhood.
640J/706F's speaker went public using first-person, directly addressing the lover. Similar speakers emerge in half of the eighteen poems in the 1891 Love cluster[n.4]. In all first person poems the lover is not "had" in life. For the speaker "lovers enjoy a privileged relationship to time and space" (Wolff 369). Mortal love denied with domestic metaphor, to reject fully this "speaker adopts a Voice that looks not to this world, but to transcendence" (Wolff 377). Hypothetical scenarios of afterlife argue for "separateness".
| I could not die with you,
For one must wait To shut the other's gaze down, - You could not. And I, could I stand by
|
I could not die - with You -
For One must wait To shut the Other's Gaze down - You - could not - And I - Could I stand by
|
| [1891 Higginson/Todd edition]
Variations from 2nd column marked in red |
[1955 Johnson variorum edition]
Red denotes Fascicle 33 variants |
"While Dickinson partook of the popular cultural myths and fictions concerning death and the afterlife, she found the premises of mid-nineteenth century America deeply questionable" (Petrino 6). Deathbed scenes public events with their own etiquette, this speaker, playing on the cultural "fear and anxiety about death" (Petrino 6), expresses concern that her lover would be too distraught to carry out his conventional deathbed duties. Creating a scene of high sentimentalism, the speaker twists expected deathbed behavior to support her doubt and to deny the lover again. "Hardly a conventional 'rival,' doubt nonetheless adds 'value' to the goal" (Burbick 82). Her thorough denial continues.
An anonymous 1860 article discussed the "only too common . . . literature of misery. Its writers are chiefly women" (Petrino 11). This genre "defined a poet's worth in terms of the capacity to convey grief . . . women writers claimed special talent as a result of their suffering and self-sacrifice" (Petrino 12). Petrino notes that the article's "quasi-scientific desire for the poet 'to see objects distinctly' not 'through a mist of tears,' elevates rationality over feeling" (11) but that this "rational" writing was not expected of women writers, intellectual inferiors to men. Dickinson adopts the "language of sentimentalism to question the essentializing view that women were an unthinking fount of emotions" (Petrino 18). Instead this speaker argues both from logic and emotion.
"The division of the manuscripts between the Dickinson and Todd families continued into the twentieth century. Each family published sections from them before the manuscripts came to rest[n.5]" (Franklin xvii) By 1955, "Thomas H. Johnson prepared a new edition from both sets of manuscripts" housed at Harvard University and Amherst College, "publishing The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson", the 3-volume Variorum edition and presenting 1775 poems" ("Publication" 2). Johnson's purpose was: "to establish an accurate text of the poems and to give them as far as possible a chronology" (lxi). His disclaimer: "all assigned dates are tentative and will always remain so" (lxii) exhibits his dedication to accuracy. Impossible to print thematically, Johnson's subject index, a remnant of early theme-grouping, links poems more specifically by word choice. Poem 640J/706F, listed under the heading "Love and the individual" and the subheading "separation", is included with four other poems[n.6] (Poems 729). Only two are clearly love poems, testimony to the modern challenge of clustering Dickinson's entire volume.
Higginson's best attempt to put Dickinson into a genre may have been his 1890 Preface's claim "that her poems 'belong emphatically to . . . 'the Poetry of the Portfolio,' -something produced absolutely without the thought of publication, and solely by way of expression of the writer's own mind" (qtd in Blake and Wells 10). Johnson responded to this definition by presenting the poem exactly as Dickinson intended, printing the "working" manuscript's variations below the poems. Assuming that the portfolio's non-publishing writers could "rise above the desire to publish and so stay true to their original conception" (Petrino 36), for Dickinson the portfolio seemed a fitting genre.
|
Nor could I rise with you
Because your face Would put out Jesus', That new grace Glow plain and foreign
They'd judge us - how?
Because you saturated sight,
| Nor could I rise - with You -
Because Your Face Would put out Jesus'- That New Grace Glow plain - and foreign
They'd judge Us - How -
Because You saturated Sight -
|
| [1891 Higginson/Todd edition]
Variations from 2nd column marked in red |
[1955 Johnson variorum edition]
Red denotes Fascicle 33 variants |
These four stanzas do not present the expected 19th Century afterlife scene. The speaker and her beloved's "metamorphoses. . . not only depend upon the patriarchal Christian mysteries of transformation, they parody and subvert them" (Gilbert 33). Closeness to the lover becomes responsible for the speaker's inability to enter Heaven with eyes seeking Jesus. For Christians "the ultimate face-to-face encounter is possible only after death and the promised new birth in Christ" (Wolff 375), yet in the poem, "passion vivid upon the beloved's countenance becomes its own radiance" (Wolff 367). This radiance is "saturating", blinding even. Perhaps Dickinson was explaining the same phenomena of saturated vision in Letter #260 when she wrote Higginson in 1861 for his outlook: "The Mind is so near itself - it cannot see, distinctly- and I have none to ask-" (Letters 171). In both scenarios the woman's sight is influenced by the man's but she holds the ultimate decision, the speaker over swoon and the poet over alteration.
| And were you lost, I would be,
Though my name Rang loudest On the heavenly fame. And were you saved, And I condemned to be Where you were not, That self were hell to me. |
And were You lost, I would be -
Though My Name Rang loudest On the Heavenly fame - And were You - saved - And I - condemned to be Where You were not - That self - were Hell to Me - |
| [1891 Higginson/Todd edition]
Variations from 2nd column marked in red |
[1955 Johnson variorum edition]
Red denotes Fascicle 33 variants |
The speaker teases the lover with her devotion here, envisioning insufficient separate selves after Judgment that prove mortal insufficiency. "Invoking a language of transcendence to show love's splendor not it's location" (Wolff 380) this speaker uses love's devastating uncertainty in this ultimate setting as dismissal of Love in mortal life. Hypothetical scenarios succeed in final rejection. Can the same be argued about the poet's intent to publish? If Dickinson could have envisioned publishing her way in life, she may not have chose to "smile" at the "delay". Karl Keller, like many critics, claims Dickinson was ambitious to publish. "She would have loved to have been set among the stars. It has been sheer sexism to make Emily Dickinson one of our saints of failure" (79).
In 1981 Ralph Franklin's Manuscript Book of Emily Dickinson was published. The voyeuristic peek into the manuscripts reminds readers of Dickinson's dedication to variations and self-publication as it provides the most indisputable text of 640J/706F. Franklin's "edition makes the manuscript books of the poet available for the first time, restored as closely as possible to their original order and, through fascimilie reproduction, presented much as she left them for Lavinia and the world[n.7]" (Franklin ix).
In his introduction Franklin explains Dickinson's possible motive for binding. "Each bound unit replaced multiplicity and confusion . . . and about 1861, some three years after she began assembling manuscript books, alternate readings became abundant in the fascicles"(x). Whether, as Franklin explains, Dickinson dismissed an "organized legacy for the world" (x) or "found the books difficult to use" (x), she chose "to copy fascicle sheets without binding them" (x). Dickinson's first working variation comes in line 35:
| Because you saturated sight,
And I had no more eyes For sordid excellence As Paradise. |
Because You saturated Sight -
And I had no more Eyes For sordid + Excellence As Paradise + Consequence |
| [1891 Higginson/Todd edition]
Variations from 2nd column marked in red |
[1955 Johnson variorum edition]
Red denotes Fascicle 33 variants |
Choosing "Excellence" the speaker owns her blasphemy - Paradise's quality becomes sordid. Inserting "Consequence" the loss is of a believer's fear - sordid Judgment. Heresy arises- "it is not God but these lovers who impart meaning to Paradise" (Wolff 380).
The Franklin Table of Contents indicates the numbers of manuscripts from Amherst (A) and Harvard (H), "the poem numbers in the variorum, and the first lines of the poems" (Franklin xx.) Thus, Fascicle 33 contains Poems from Harvard pieces 39-44 whose Johnson/Franklin numbers become very telling: H39: 636J/700F, 637J/701F, 472J/702F, 638J/703F, H40: 639J/704F, 473J/705F, H41: 640J/706F, 641J/707F, H42: 474J/708F, 642J/709F, 475J/710F, H43: 313J/283F, 476J/711F, and H44: (completion of poem 476), 643J/712F, 644J/713F, 477J, 714F[n.8] (Franklin 785). The fact that today Franklin's poems are understood to be more chronologically accurate than Johnson's is a direct reflection on his consideration of the fascicle manuscripts.
Fascicle variations are supplied again in line 50:
| So we must keep apart,
You there, I here, With just the door ajar That oceans are, * And prayer, And that pale sustenance, Despair! |
So We must meet apart -
You there - I - here - With just the Door ajar That Oceans are - and Prayer - And that White + Sustenance - Despair - +Exercise - Privilege - |
| [1891 Higginson/Todd edition]
Variations from 2nd column marked in red |
[1955 Johnson variorum edition]
Red denotes Fascicle 33 variants |
| *note line breaks | |
That Dickinson considered these two interchangeable defenses of "Despair" further supports her speaker's powerful choice of separation. Despair becomes a mere "Exercise" or a non-conformist's "Privilege", neither devastating realities. "White is the color of spiritual election, physical virginity, and metaphyiscal ambiguity; and when placed in the context of publication, this color refers more obviously to a blank page" (Petrino 48). Glorified "Despair" overturns the sentiment fitting a scenario of self-denial.
Presenting multiple interpretations, Dickinson speaks "With just the Door ajar" "by standing on one side speaking to a listener on the other, but her 'separateness' also contradicts any expectations concerning the transparency of literary language" (3). The difficulty inherent in explicating her poems exhibits Dickinson's further separation. Sharon Cameron claims she "refused to make up her mind about how her poems should be read," that she was "choosing not to choose" (qtd. in Porter 190). Dickinson chose in life, and through her language, as did her speaker to claim separation as "privilege".
Respectful of their subversion of cultural expectations, Dickinson's voices speak more representatively to readers of the twentieth century. "From the 1930's to the present the reputation of Emily Dickinson has grown immensely . . . in the sense of clarification" (Blake and Wells vi). Modern readers must embrace the challenge of explication and the dedication to text accuracy. "Dickinson's indecision is said to shift the interpreter's task, then, from finding meanings to finding whether there are boundaries to the meanings" (Porter 190). As Dickinson asserted "My business is Circumference" (Letters 176) "she also asserts 'My business is Love' a theme for women in her time" (Porter 192).
Reading the first person voices in her poetry as Dickinson speaking is tempting, but readers must step carefully. Emily Dickinson wrote: "When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse- it does not mean-me-but a supposed person" (Letters 176). The poet-speaker connection is not as important as the accurate presentation of the poem for both the poet and speaker to remain intact. In 640J/706F Dickinson creates a speaker that finds an alternative to compromising her ideals, just as she did with non-publication.
[Back] 1. "By the 1840's . . . Genteel magazines . . . set the standards of literary taste and encouraged the development of a national audience for women's domestic fiction and verse" (Petrino 22). "Helen Hunt Jackson, Lydia Sigourney, Louisa May Alcott, Julia Ward Howe, Maria Lowell, as well as Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and countless others made their way into the poet's conscious life" (Petrino 5) through the magazines and newspapers of the Dickinson household.
[Back] 2. In 1862 Dickinson wrote Higginson in Letter #260 with four poems (216J/124F, 319J/304F, 320J/282F and 318J/204F) asking "Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?" (Letters 171). He responds quickly that her style is not fit for publishing, provides editorial suggestions, and requests more. "Thank you for the surgery - it was not so painful as I supposed." Dickinson writes back in Letter #261, "I bring you others - as you ask - though they might not differ -" (Letters 172).
[Back] 3. "With a blue pencil Professor Todd", Mabel Todd's husband "placed a number at the top of the first page of each packet, and as they later came into his house, on the envelopes containing the remaining manuscripts" ("Editing" xli). Care was taken to keep the manuscripts as they were left but mistakes were made. "Beyond that point the grouping is miscellaneous . . . the arrangements reflect Mrs. Todd's effort to produce a semblance of order among manuscripts that in fact had no order at all" ("Editing" xli).
[Back] 4. "YOU left me, sweet, two, legacies,-" (281J/713F), "Even as herself, O friend!" (729J/755F), "DOUBT me, my dim companion!" (215J/332F), "IF you were coming in the fall," (511J/336F) "You, unsuspecting, wear me too-" (903J/80F), "THAT I did always love,/I bring thee proof:" (549J/652F), "MY river runs to thee:" (162J/219F), and "COME slowly, Eden!/Lips unused to thee," (211J/205F) are the eight others. The first lover is dead, the second is a "friend", the third, a "companion" doubts the speaker's logic, the fourth "you" is an expected visitor, the fifth speaker hides, and the sixth speaker logically argues her love. The last two poems address a metaphorical river and Eden- the cluster's only examples of explicitly sexual address.
[Back] 5. The "manuscripts came to rest, still divided, in the Houghton Library of Harvard University and in the Amherst college Library. Martha Dickinson Bianchi, the poet's niece, issued The Single Hound (1914) from manuscripts sent to Sue; Further Poems (1929); Unpublished Poems (1935); collected editions (1924, 1930, 1937); and biographical treatments that include poems. And from the Todd portion, Millicent Todd Bingham; daughter of the first editor, published Bolts of Melody (1945) and some articles" (Franklin xvii).
[Back] 6. The speaker in 240J/262F says "But - Moon - and Star -/Though you're very far -/There is one - farther than you-" speaking of God's elusive distance. Speaking of nature's bee in 620J/686 F: "His separation from His Rose -/To Him - sums Misery" this speaker further echoes the conflicts in 640J/706F with the bee's lack of concern for "Judgment" ("sordid excellence") in Heaven because of its Mortal "Misery" ("Cannot"). Another nature address, the speaker of 956J/915F claims "I - do not fly, so Wherefore/ My Perrenial Things?" questioning her connection to God and nature's yearly revitalization. The speaker of poem 1743J/1784F concludes the cluster of "separation" with "For two divided, briefly,/A cycle, it may be,/Till everlasting life unite", reiterating 640J/706F speaker's cyclical "live. . . die. . . rise. . . judge". Connections between poems can be made but 640J/706F and 1743J/1784F are the only clearly "love" poems of the entry.
[Back] 7. "After the poet's death in 1886 the Dickinson manuscripts suffered disarray and some mutilation. Thomas H. Johnson's variorum edition was the first attempt to identify the original fascicle arrangement" (Franklin xiii). Franklin points to "an eight-page list, now in the Amherst College Library that Todd prepared in 1889. When understood, it indicates the order of poems within fascicles so presented. . .The primary evidence is from the manuscripts themselves. Soiling. . . stain offsets, matching smudge patterns, pin impressions. . . paper wrinkles. . .[p]uncture patterns. . . and stress effects. . vary within fascicles" (Franklin xiv).
[Back] 8. Most interesting are the reoccurring conflicts the voices bound in Franklin numbers 701-711 present. "The Child's faith is new-/. . . Believes all sham/But Paradise-" (701F) reiterates the adult's duty to question rather than childishly accept tradition. "But just to hear the Grace depart-/. . . Afflicts me with a Double loss-/'Tis lost- And lost to me-" (702F) repeats the notion of "death's privilege". "To My Small Hearth His fire came -/ . . . 'Twas Sunrise -'twas the Sky-" (703F) reiterates the symbolism of the domestic and the power of transformation. "My Portion is Defeat - today-/. . . Contenteder - to die-" (704F) repeats a refusal to fear death."I am ashamed - I hide- /What right have I - to be a Bride-" (705F) conveys both the celebration of the sacrament and an unexpected resistance to it. Bound exclusively with 706F, 707F, with: "Size circumscribes- it has no room" addresses the relativity of size, reminding readers of the poet's "circumference". 708F's speaker sounds very similar to 706F's "saturated sight" with: "Of Paradise - aware-/Each other's Face - was all the Disc/Each other's setting-saw-". "Me from Myself -to banish-/Had I Art-/ Invincible My Fortress/Unto All Heart-" (709F) and "Doom is the House without the Door-/. . .'Tis varied by the Dream/Of what they do outside-"(710F) discuss the same hiding "apart" from society. The chronological misfit, 283F's speaker claims: "Earth would have been too much -I see-/And Heaven-not enough for me-" describing the limits on living and dying of grand faith. Another speaker expresses religious doubt: "But I, grown shrewder -scan the Skies/With a suspicious Air-" (711F). "Yet Hesitating Fractions -Both/Surveyed Infinity-" (712F) also exhibits lovers turning to transcendence for mortal answers. "Between Eternity and Time-/Your Consciousness- and me-", the speaker in 713F addresses a dead "Sire" and the gap between reunion in Heaven. Finally 714F: "No Man can compass a Despair-/. . . His ignorance-the Angel/That pilot Him along-" speaks of being fooled by conventional religious expectations of faith.
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