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Set in Stone

Millicent Todd Bingham’s observation on Dickinson’s regard for nature in her book “Ancestors’ Brocades, The Literary Debut of Emily Dickinson”: “Snakes and flies, grass and stones, as well as wind and rain and the rising of the moon over the Pelham hills, all were of the essence of miracle.” 

In regard to that quote, I am addressing those specific seven subjects in Dickinson’s poetry: snakes, flies, grass, stones, wind, rain, and the moon.  

Today’s focus: Stones

In how many poems did Dickinson use the word “stone”?  

Well, that depends.  

If you search “stone” on the online archive, 89 entries pop up, and that represents 32 different poems.  However, there are some peculiarities.  

For example, in one version of “The moon was but a chin of gold,” Dickinson describes the moon’s face as “Her Forehead is of Amplest Blonde / Her Cheek – a Beryl stone.” In another version, her cheek is “a Beryl hewn.”

The Johnson, Franklin, and Miller editions of Dickinson’s poetry include “a Beryl hewn” – so should this poem NOT be included among the “stone” poems? 

(ASIDE: I love that the "man in the moon" is a woman in Dickinson's poem.)

Then there is a variant of “She laid her docile crescent down” that reads “HE laid HIS docile crescent down” – but I think I should count this as one poem, not two.

There are also different versions of “Safe in their alabaster chambers” – the second stanzas vary – but the first stanzas are the same (and include the word “stone”) – so should this count as one or two different poems? Or more?  I believe there were as many as five different versions of this poem.

Both of these versions are from Johnson's The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson:

Another very well-known poem with “stone” is Dickinson’s “After great pain, a formal feeling comes” – when that “formal feeling” is described by the poet as “A Quartz contentment, like a stone” (line 9).

One odd thing about this poem is that lines 6 and 7 are reversed between the Johnson and Franklin editions of Dickinson’s “complete poems.”

One last “stone” poem – and it’s one of my favorites – is “How happy is the little stone.” Interestingly, though, I can interpret this poem in two ways – a positive way where the stone is happy with its authentic self and its place in the universe; and a negative way where the stone – like the old saying goes – is “dumb as a rock,” unaware, perhaps, of truth, facts, and reality.  

Which way do you read the poem?

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Hit the Hay

Millicent Todd Bingham’s observation on Dickinson’s regard for nature in her book “Ancestors’ Brocades, The Literary Debut of Emily Dickinson”: “Snakes and flies, grass and stones, as well as wind and rain and the rising of the moon over the Pelham hills, all were of the essence of miracle.” 

In regard to that quote, I am addressing those specific seven subjects in Dickinson’s poetry: snakes, flies, grass, stones, wind, rain, and the moon.  

Today’s focus:  Grass

 When it comes to plants, the word “flower” appears in 90 different poems by Dickinson, “tree” is mentioned in 58 – and “grass” is included in 33.

Perhaps the most well-known poems which mention “grass” are “A narrow fellow in the grass” (the poem I discussed in my post on “snake”) and “A Bird came down the walk.”

Here are the first two stanzas:

The entire poem is HERE.

Two other notable works are “The wind began to knead the grass” (with one variant that begins “The wind began to rock the grass”) and “The grass has so little to do.”

With that last one, “The grass so little has to do,” the editors engaged in strong debate way back in 1889 about the final line of the poem as they prepared it for publication.

Dickinson wrote “I wish I were a hay” as the ultimate line (as in a single blade of grass with so little to do), and Mable Loomis Todd was fine with that; however, Thomas Wentworth Higginson dissented.  He thought, grammatically, “I wish I were a hay” would be too objectionable to public taste as “hay” is an uncountable noun, a mass – so he insisted on “I wish I were the hay.”  

Higginson won that debate – until the late twentieth century when newer volumes of Dickinson’s poems were published.

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I’m Nobody! Who are you?

Are you – New on Tumblr – too?

Then there’s a pair of us!

Let’s tell! Let’s advertise – you know!

(Follow for a daily dose of Dickinson.)

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On the Fly

Millicent Todd Bingham’s observation on Dickinson’s regard for nature in her book “Ancestors’ Brocades, The Literary Debut of Emily Dickinson”: “Snakes and flies, grass and stones, as well as wind and rain and the rising of the moon over the Pelham hills, all were of the essence of miracle.” 

In regard to that quote, I am addressing those specific seven subjects in Dickinson’s poetry: snakes, flies, grass, stones, wind, rain, and the moon.  

Today’s focus:  Flies

When you type the word “fly” into the search field of the Dickinson online archive, 90 entries pop up, and those entries represent thirty-six different poems in which Dickinson used the word “fly.”  However, only ten of the poems reference the insect, the fly.  

Of course, the most well-known of the “fly” poems is “I heard a fly buzz when I died.”  That poem was written in 1862 and first published in 1896. 

Can you imagine Victorians reading a poem about a fly – with a “Blue – uncertain – stumbling buzz” heard by one who is dying – only to have “the Windows” fail – “And then I could not see to see”?  (LOL – I’ve always equated that concluding line with the abrupt blackout in the finale of “The Sopranos”).

Who were famous American poets in 1890, the year of Emily Dickinson’s literary debut (selected poems by Dickinson were published in 1890, 1891 and 1896)?

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Madison Cawein

Danske Dandridge

John Hay

Joaquin Miller

James Whitcomb Riley

Richard Henry Stoddard

John Greenleaf Whittier

Of the names above, with which are you familiar with their poetry?  (Imma be honest – for me, it’s one.)

I picked one of the poets above at random, Madison Cawein, and I found a poem of similar theme, “A Song for Old Age" (click HERE).  In this case, the speaker isn’t on his deathbed, though his “old heart” is growing “older.”  In place of “windows” there are “curtains”:

The curtains, sad and heavy,

      Where all shall sleep anon.

I wonder what Cawein would have thought of Dickinson’s work?

LOL – I just looked over the poem by Cawein and noticed that it includes two dashes -- so bully for him!

Of course, I haven’t even addressed the painful revisions Mabel Loomis Todd made to the poem in order to make the lines more “palatable” to the public.

Good grief, check out those first two lines:  From the original, “I heard a Fly buzz - when I died - The Stillness in the Room“ to “I heard a fly buzz when I died / The stillness round my form” – so that “form” at the end of line 2 would rhyme with “storm” at the end of line 4. 

Okay, enough.

Below: "I heard a fly buzz when I died" as printed in the Johnson, Franklin & Miller editions of Dickinson's "Complete Poems." The only difference I could spot is the additional dash in line 13 -- and I don't see that dash in Dickinson's handwritten version of the poem (above).

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Snake in the Grass

A recent post about the poetry of Emily Dickinson included Millicent Todd Bingham’s observation about the poet’s regard for nature: “Snakes and flies, grass and stones, as well as wind and rain and the rising of the moon over the Pelham hills, all were of the essence of miracle.” 

In regard to that quote, I thought for my next seven posts, I’d address those specific seven subjects in Dickinson’s poetry: snakes, flies, grass, stones, wind, rain, and the moon.  

Today’s focus:  Snakes.

If you type the word “snake” into the search field of the Dickinson online archive, 19 results pop up, and those entries represent the six different poems in which Dickinson used the word “snake.”  

Interestingly, though, Dickinson’s most famous poem about a snake does not appear on the archive’s list of entries.  That’s because the poem, “A narrow fellow in the grass,” is ABOUT a snake, but it does not include the word “snake.” 

The poem was published in 1891 in the second series of “Poems.”  The book was edited by Mabel Loomis Todd, and it was she who gave the poem its title, "The Snake."

Tomorrow: Flies

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Instant Replay

At times, searching for a poem on the online Dickinson Archive can be tricky.  Take for example, the poem “For each ecstatic instant.”  If you search for the word “ecstatic,” which occurs in the first line of the poem,” or “ecstasy,” which occurs in the fourth line,” the poem does not appear in the entries found. 

In the example shown below, there are 43 entries for “ecstasy,” and I’ve sorted the poems in alphabetical order, and the list goes from “Betrothed to righteousness might be” to “COMPENSATION” to “Go not too near a House of Rose.”  “For each ecstatic instant” is not included in the list.

Well, in an odd way in this case, the poem is actually there. 

When the poem was first published in 1891, the editor Mabel Loomis Todd gave the poem the name “COMPENSATION” – so unless you knew that, you would not know that “For each ecstatic instant” was included on the list.

When the poem was published in 1891 in the second series of poems by Dickinson released to the public, few editorial changes were made to the poem – except in the case of punctuation, capitalization, and spelling.

Yep, as far as the spelling goes, Dickinson wrote “extatic” and “extasy.”  Todd changed the spellings to “ecstatic” and “ecstasy.” 

Does that really matter?

Well, in this case, maybe not (except changes like this can make internet searches a little tricky); but how/when should changes be made to Dickinson’s punctuation, capitalization, spelling, and grammar?  Can one tell when Dickinson was being deliberate vs. careless?

For example, in “Of Tribulation – these are they,” Dickinson deliberately spelled the word “ankle” as “ancle”

How do we know this choice was deliberate?

Dickinson sent the poem to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and on the bottom of the page, she wrote, “I spelled ankle wrong” (it has to do with a reference to a passage in the Bible that for many years used the spelling “ancle”).

Sometimes in the past, though, early editors were a bit too ambitious with their editing of Dickinson.  They changed words, rhymes, lines – even complete stanzas!

If the foolish call them 'flowers,' Need the wiser tell? If the savans 'classify' them, It is just as well!

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Common Good

Do you love the poetry of Emily Dickinson?  If so, what is it about her poetry that connects with you?

Listen to this passage from 1945’s “Ancestors’ Brocades” by Millicent Todd Bingham, daughter of Mable Loomis Todd, the co-editor of the first posthumous edition of Dickinson’s poetry; these comments set the stage for Bingham’s take on the power of Dickinson’s poetry:

“To excite Emily’s interest nothing was too trivial or too familiar. She took nothing for granted, ignoring it as one ignores air. Snakes and flies, grass and stones, as well as wind and rain and the rising of the moon over the Pelham hills, all were of the essence of miracle. The lowliest forms of life were as authentic, as worthy of note, as those usually celebrated in poetry.”

Dickinson’s appreciation and passion for the quotidian lies at the heart of Bingham’s assessment of the poet’s depth and profundity:

“Emily did not reach out toward abstractions in order to find universal truth. The smallest object close at hand would serve. Through the gateway of minutiae she opened mighty vistas, each one adjusted to him who is able to perceive it. Indeed, I have at times suspected that what we think of Emily’s poetry is more a measure of ourselves than of her. By our changing attitude toward it we can estimate our own growth. Many of the poems I have known by heart since early childhood. But as insight deepens, sentences whose tinkle always pleased me suddenly become heavy with significance. One rereading the words familiar through a lifetime, their truth suddenly flashes.”

Bingham then quoted these lines:

She concluded her thoughts with this: “It takes a lifetime of striving, and of failure, to comprehend that.”

__________

NOTE: The collage behind Emily Dickinson in the pic above is the work of Toronto Artist Jennifer Murphy.

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The Sun kept stooping—stooping—low!

The Hills to meet him rose!

On his side, what Transaction!

On their side, what Repose!

~ Emily Dickinson

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Family Feud

The Dickinsons of Amherst, MA, might appear to us in the 21st century to be a prim and proper Victorian family.  Additionally, one might think the efforts to publish Dickinson's poems following her death were nothing more than a labor or love – but it was anything but.  

In regards to the family and the efforts to publish Dickinson’s poetry posthumously, complications (and outright feuds) developed on multiple fronts.  First, Dickinson’s brother Austin engaged in a torrid love affair with Mabel Loomis Todd, the wife of an Amherst College astronomy professor. Later, Emily’s sister Lavinia Dickinson grew frustrated with her sister-in-law Susan’s sluggish work with editing her sister’s poems.  Not long after the publication of the early editions of Dickinson’s poetry, Lavinia took Mabel Loomis Todd to court over a parcel of land promised to the Todds by Austin Dickinson. And all of that just scratches the surface.

Interestingly, these issues relate to some of my recent posts about the corrections that Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson had to make to the first edition of Dickinson’s poetry after the book of selected poems was published in 1890.  

For example, in an 1891 letter from Thomas Wentworth Higginson to Mabel Loomis Todd, Higginson wrote about a typo discovered by Susan Dickinson in the poem “I know some lonely houses off the road”:  “Mrs. Dickinson thinks ‘a pair of spectacles afar just stir’ should be ‘ajar’ as in her MS.  If you approve please notify Mr. Niles” (the publisher rep with Roberts Brothers, the company which printed and distributed the first edition of Dickinson’s poetry).

Susan Dickinson did, in fact, bring the “afar”/”ajar” misprint to Higginson’s attention – and Millicent Todd Bingham, Mabel Loomis Todd’s daughter, wrote about this in her 1945 account of her mother’s work in editing and publishing Dickinson’s work:

“Sue was right about the spectacles. But instead of calling the mistake to the attention of her neighbor (i.e, Mabel Loomis Todd), Mrs. Dickinson had notified Colonel Higginson.  It may seem a trivial matter to have approached in so roundabout a way – writing to a distant gentleman whom she did not know in order to reach an editor close at hand.  But it cannot be repeated too often that no mistake was overlooked as an occasion for blame. In spite of the welter of Dickinson animosities in which my mother was involved, however – any by now she and Sue were not on speaking terms – she was able to detach herself sufficiently to acknowledge that Sue had caught her in a mistake. It was corrected in the next edition of the book.”

Yes, the correction was made. But things only got hotter. 

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Dickinsonian Rhapsody

"Who was Arlo Bates?" you ask.

Arlo Bates was an American author, educator and newspaperman -- and he gave Roberts Brothers publishers his appraisal of Emily Dickinson's poetry as they were preparing to print and distribute a small number of the first edition of "Poems" in 1890, Emily Dickinson's literary debut.

I wrote about Bates the other day. I'm new to Tumblr -- so I'll try to link that specific post HERE -- and if it doesn't work, then search the tag for "Arlo Bates."

Anyway, this post continues with additional information:

Concerning Bates’ letter to Roberts Brother where he shared his appraisal Dickinson’s poetry:

One the one hand he gushed, “There is hardly one of these poems which does not bear marks of unusual and remarkable talent.”

On the other hand, like Thomas Wentworth Higginson and others, he fretted over the poems’ ‘extraordinary crudity of workmanship.”

In the same letter, he continued to both praise (strikingly) and criticize (pedantically):

“Had she published, and been forced by ambition and perhaps by need into learning the technical part of her art, she would have stood at the head of American singers. As it is she has put upon paper what reminded her of a mood or an emotion, and in nine cases out of ten she has not got enough down to convey the intelligence of her mood to any but the most sympathetic & poetical. There are some poems in the book, however, that are so royally good, & so many that to the poetical will be immensely suggestive, that it seems a pity not to have at least a small edition.”

Interesting, huh.

Today, Dickinson does stand “at the head of American singers” – and who’s heard of Arlo Bates? #justsaying

As an aside, all this talk about content v. form reminded me of info I’d read recently about some of the initial reviews of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” Many music critics criticized Gershwin's piece as “essentially formless and asserted that the composer had haphazardly glued melodic segments together.” One review in the New York Tribune criticized the work as “derivative,” “stale,” an “Inexpressive.”

Go figure.

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Poetically Correct

Yesterday’s post focused on corrections needed to be made by the editors of the first published edition of poems by Emily Dickinson – specifically, emendations needed for typographical errors made in “A wounded deer leaps highest,” “My river runs to thee,” & “As if some little Arctic flower.”

There was also discussion as to the use of “lain” (vs. “laid”) in line 3 of “I died for Beauty, but was scarce,” but Thomas Wentworth Higginson insisted no change be made with that.

In an 1891 letter from Higginson to Mabel Loomis Todd about the various changes needed, Higginson wrote, “I have forwarded your corrections except the ‘lain�� which I think had better stay as it is.”

In that same letter, though, he brought up another typo discovered by Susan Dickinson, Emily Dickinson's sister-in-law, in “I know some lonely houses off the road”:

“Mrs. Dickinson thinks ‘a pair of spectacles afar just stir’ should be ‘ajar’ as in her MS. If you approve please notify Mr. Niles.”

Mr. Niles was the publisher with Roberts Brothers, the company which printed and distributed the first edition of Dickinson’s poetry.

Susan Dickinson did, in fact, bring the “afar”/”ajar” misprint to Higginson’s attention in a letter in which she also wrote this:

“I meant to have told you too of a funny bit. One of our son’s Prof’s returning the Library copy of the Poems said to my son, ‘Col H. is a famous man but does not know much about typography. I have made a correction in the poem about the approaching shower’ (i.e., “A drop fell on the apple tree”). The book has it, “hoisted roads.” Of course it should be “moisted,”  there is no sense in the other.’ Need I add that I sent for the volume, erased his “m,” and said, ‘Prof. E. is a fine geologist but no poet.’”

More on this letter tomorrow.

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Corrective Measures

Recent posts have focused on edits and corrections editors made with the first edition of poems by Emily Dickinson.  Yesterday I focused on the use of “lain” (vs. “laid” – for the ever confounding verbs “lay” and “lie”), specifically in the poems “I died for beauty, but was scarce” and “How many times these low feet staggered.”

“Even outsiders protested” (about issues with grammar) wrote Millicent Todd Bingham in “Ancestors’ Brocades,” her 1945 account of “Emily Dickinson’s Literary Debut.”  

Bingham shared a letter from a school principal to Thomas Wentworth Higginson about the “lain”/”laid” issue in the two poems mentioned above, and across the top of that letter he wrote, “I have discouraged this” (i.e., making any change). 

Between the third and fourth printing of the first edition of “Poems,” co-editor Mabel Loomis Todd wrote to Higginson to discuss some misprints in the book.

“The first (in the poem beginning ‘A wounded deer leaps highest’) is on page 20 – of which I wrote you some time ago – in the line ‘In which it cautious arm,’ printed “cautiONS, although I three times corrected it in the proof.”

Later in the letter she wrote, “And on page 54 (in the poem ‘My river runs to thee’), in the last line, I am sure she intended it to be two lines instead,

     Say, sea,

     Take me!

and that is very piquant and like her.”

A third suggestion involved the poem “As if some little Arctic flower”: 

“Should not the ‘only,’ beginning the last line, be instead the final word in the preceding line?  It it read

     What then? Why nothing, only

     Your inference therefrom!

would not the rhythm be better?”

Finally, she re-visited the “lain”/”laid” issue in “I died for Beauty, but was scarce.”

Bingham wrote in “Ancestors’ Brocades,” “Except the last, all the suggested corrections were made.  ‘Was lain’ remains to this day, as Mr. Higginson decreed.”

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Lay Lady Lay (or is it Lie?)

I’ve been writing about some of the initial editing work done by Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson as they planned to publish the first edition of poems by Emily Dickinson.

In addition to having to decipher Dickinson’s handwriting, they also had to figure out which words she might have landed on (among her various alternative word choices listed on pages of her poetry) had she finalized all of her poems. They also made corrections to spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and grammar.  

On one hand, some of Dickinson’s grammatical errors can be “traceable to the fact that she followed current spoken usage” of the time (from p. 42 of “Ancestors’ Brocades).  

On the other hand, “for the first editors the perennial uncertainty was: which are mistakes and which are intentional irregularities with a definite function to perform.” 

For example: there is an interesting story behind Dickinson’s deliberate misspelling of “ankle” as “ancle” in “Of Tribulation – these are they,” HERE.  

Following the publication of the first edition of “Poems” in 1890, Thomas Wentworth Higginson received a letter from Julia Eastman, one of the joint principals of a school for girls.

“Dear Sir,” wrote Ms. Eastman, “Would it be an ‘impertinence’ – to borrow your own word (from the preface of the book) – to ask if one change might not be made in the next edition of Emily  Dickinson’s Poems?

On page 119, in the line, ‘When one who died for truth was lain,” could not ‘laid’ be substituted without harming the poem?  The poem on the following page has the same error in the last stanza, but an amendation would be more troublesome there.”

Ms. Eastman added, “To most of the educated people of New England, the confusion of ‘lie’ & ‘lay’ is condoned with some difficulty.”

Sooo…how is your own expertise with “lie” and “lay”?  LOL – should I prepare a quiz for tomorrow?  

For now, here are the two poems in question.

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Performance Appraisal

Who was Arlo Bates?  

Arlo Bates was an American author, educator and newspaperman.

An 1876 graduate of Bowdoin College, Bates became the editor of the Boston Sunday Courier in 1880.  Later he taught English at the MIT.

In 1889, the prospective publisher of Dickinson’s poems sent the selected poems to Bates for an appraisal.  Here is some of what Bates said about his first look at Dickinson’s poetry:

“There is hardly one of these poems which does not bear marks of unusual and remarkable talent.”

Like Higginson and others, though, Bates fretted about the format: “there is hardly one of them which is not marked by an extraordinary crudity of workmanship.”

Dang, those Victorians were hung up on rigid formats and convention.

Bates continued, though, with “The author was a person or power which came very near to that indefinable quality which we call genius.”

Hmm…”very near”?

I’ll continue with more of Bates’ report tomorrow.

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Daddy Dearest

I’ve been writing about the initial editing of Dickinson’s poetry by her first editors/publishers, Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson.  They agreed to sort the poems in Todd’s possession into three categories:

A: Those “of most original thought” and “in the best form.”

B: Those with “striking ideas” but “with too many of her peculiarities of construction.”

C: Those considered “too obscure” or “too irregular in form.” 

Of course, all of this work took place in 1889, and the first publication debuted in 1890.  Todd documented the process in a 1930 article for Harper’s Magazine, and Todd’s daughter Millicent Todd Bingham also wrote about it in her 1945 book “Ancestors’ Brocades.”

In that book, Bingham also included info about her father, David Peck Todd, and his contribution to the process:

“The part played by my father, especially in seeing the poems through the press has hitherto been overlooked.  For several years he gave a good deal of time to the work – to proofreading in particular.  ‘We made independent lists of the ratings A, B, and C, and then compared them,’ he told me, adding that ‘we used to sit up all night to read the proof.’”

From 1881 to 1917, David Peck Todd  was a professor of astronomy and director of the observatory at Amherst College. For more on his life, check HERE.

Below left: David Peck Todd and Mabel Loomis Todd; below right: Millicent Todd (later Millicent Todd Bingham).

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Ch-Ch-Changes

Emily Dickinson died in 1886, and in 1889, Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson were editing her poems to publish them posthumously.  

The two editors had sorted about 200 or so poems into three categories:

A: Those “of most original thought” and “in the best form.”

B: Those with “striking ideas” but “with too many of her peculiarities of construction.”

C: Those considered “too obscure” or “too irregular in form.” 

In their letters to one another about the process, Higginson mentioned two poems in particular to include:  “Glee! The great storm is over” and “I know some lonely house off the road”  (“we must have that burglary” wrote Higginson). 

I posted both of those poems yesterday, and I wondered how much editing Todd and Higginson did on them to ready them for their publication.  With some of the poems, they changed words, lines and stanzas; for example in “Because I could not stop for Death,” Todd and Higginson altered lines and rhymes and even omitted an entire stanza – so with these two poems, I was curious to see what might have been changed.

To be honest, I was surprised – outside of punctuation (i.e., the use of dashes) and capitalization – how minimally the poems were altered – but changes were made. 

In “Glee – The great storm is over,” Todd and Higginson did change “urge” to “ask” in the third stanza, but “ask” was an alternate word choice considered by Dickinson.  In the same stanza they changed “story” to “shipwreck,” but I’m not sure if that word was considered a possibility by the poet.

In the final line – to correct the subject-verb agreement – they changed “Sea” to “waves” to keep the rhyme of “reply” with “eye” (had they stuck with “Sea,” they would have had to change “reply” to “replies”). 

Most of the other changes deal with the dashes, capitalization, and other instances of subject-verb agreement – and edits like these account for any changes in ‘’I know some lonely Houses off the Road.”

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Playing Favorites

Three years after Emily Dickinson’s death, Thomas Wentworth Higginson asked Mabel Loomis Todd to classify the poet’s work into three categories:

“A – Not only those of most original thought, but expressed in the best form…B, those with striking ideas, but with too many of her peculiarities of construction to be used unaltered for the public, and C, those I considered too obscure or too irregular in form for public use, however brilliant and suggestive.”

Todd sorted the poems and sent them to Higginson for review.  

“I can’t tell you how much I am enjoying the poems,” he wrote to Todd. 

In particular, Higginson loved “Glee! The great storm is over.” 

Plus, in a short letter to Todd in December 1989, he wrote, “I am at work with many interruptions on those poems; have gone through B and transferred about 20 to A (we must have that burglary).” 

That poem is  “I know some lonely houses off the road.”

And so we come to 1890, the year the first edition of Dickinson’s poems was published (HERE).  The book included 116 poems – and both of Higginson’s favorites were included.