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These Are Her Letters To The World

Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell have edited a new edition of Emily Dickinson’s letter.  The New Yorker published an article about their book this week, here:

 “A Letter always feels to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend,” wrote Dickinson to Thomas Wentworth Higginson in 1869 – and in her lifetime she wrote hundreds of letters.

However, following Dickinson’s death, her sister Lavinia destroyed much of Emily’s correspondences as per “Emily’s direction.”

In 1930, Mabel Loomis Todd, co-editor of the first posthumous edition of Dickinson’s poems, wrote this in an article about "Emily Dickinson’s Literary Debut" for Harper’s Monthly Magazine:

“Soon after her death her sister Lavinia came to me, as usual in late evening, actually trembling with excitement. She told me she had discovered a veritable treasure – quantities of Emily’s poems which she had had no instructions to destroy. She had already burned without examination hundreds of manuscripts, and letters to Emily, many of them from nationally known persons, thus, she believed, carrying out her sister’s partly expressed wishes, but without intelligent discrimination. Later she bitterly regretted such inordinate haste. But these poems, she told me, must be printed at once.”

In 1958, Thomas H. Johnson published an edition of Dickinson’s letters where, in his introduction, he stated that – due to the poet’s reclusiveness – Dickinson “did not live in history and held no view of it.”

Fast forward to the New Yorker’s article.  Its writer Kamran Javadizadeh points out that “Writing letters could…be for Dickinson not only a withdrawal from the world but also a way of extending herself into many worlds, all at once.”

In addition, “The nearly seven decades of scholarship that have followed Johnson’s pronouncement of Dickinson’s reclusiveness—scholarship to which Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell, the new volume’s editors, have contributed and from which they adroitly draw—have revealed it to be a crude caricature, one that says as much about men’s fantasies about women (and about poetry readers’ fantasies about poets) as it does about the actual person who wrote those thousand-odd letters.” 

One topic not covered in the article is Dickinson’s “Master Letters,” a set of three emotionally laden notes addressed to a figure whom Dickinson calls “Master,” but never names.

Are the Master letters included in the updated edition “The Letters of Emily Dickinson”?

Yes.  

Here’s info from an appendix of the book:

“Dickinson referred to various people in letters and poems as ‘Master,’ including *Leonard Humphrey; *Thomas Wentworth Higginson (multiple times); and (once humorously) Austin.  She also uses ‘Master’ to refer to God or Christ.  Whether ED was writing a person, a fictitious character, or experimenting with language of desire and devotion in these drafts remains in debate.”

The letters are numbered 192 (on page 268), 282 (on page 324), and 299 (on page 332).

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Emily Go Bragh!

Happy St. Patrick’s Day to those who wear the green and/or drive snakes out of town!

In tribute to the foremost patron saint of Ireland, I thought I’d check a few SPD terms in the poetry of Emily Dickinson.

Did Dickinson ever use the word “shamrock”?

Nope.

However, she did use the word “clover” in fifteen poems – or sixteen if you count the 1890 version of “Like Trains of Cars on Tracks of Plush.”  I think in that version, though, the word “clover��� was added when editors Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson combined two of Dickinson’s poems into one. 

Did Dickinson ever mention St. Patrick?  

Nope. 

How about Ireland (or “Eire”)?

Nope. 

How often did she use the word “green”?

Dickinson used the word “green” in fifteen poems – but only fourteen if you check the Johnson edition of her “complete poems.”  The poem “All overgrown by cunning moss” contains the word “green” in the Franklin edition of Dickinson’s poems, but NOT in Johnson’s edition. 

The Miller edition includes both sets of stanzas and makes the following observation:

“May acknowledge the anniversary of the death of Charlotte Bronte (d. 31 March 1855), who published “Currer Bell” and lived in Haworth.  Line 1 echoes Bronte’s “Mementos” (1846):  “all  in this house is mossing over.”  Gethsemane is the garden where Jesus prayed on the night before his crucifixion; asphodel flowers are associated with the Greek underworld, e.g. in The Odyssey.  The “Or” between stanzas between 3 and 4 (where Miller indicated the alternate stanzas) may indicate that stanzas 4 and 5 are alternatives.  In their single volume editions, THJ prints stanzas 1, 4, 5 and RWF prints stanzas 1, 2, 3.”

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How Does Your Garden Grow?

In 1891, the editor of New York’s The Independent published a favorable review of the newly published Poems by Emily Dickinson, and then he wrote to Mabel Loomis Todd requesting additional poems to publish in his paper.  She sent him four, from which he printed three.  One of the three was “Went up a year this evening!”

This poem was written in 1859, and some have speculated that it was written in tribute to Amos Newport, a hired hand who helped manage the Dickinson’s Homestead stable and grounds. 

“Old Amos,” as he was known, was the grandson of a man who had been caught as a young boy by slave traders on the coast of Africa; he was brought to Springfield, Massachusetts, and later successfully sued for his freedom.

Amos worked for the Dickinson family for at least 8 years, and in 1851, Dickinson wrote of “Old Amos” in a letter to her brother Austin:

“The garden is amazing - we have beets and beans, have had splendid potatoes for three weeks now. Old Amos weeds and hoes and has an oversight of all thoughtless vegetables. The apples are fine and large in spite of my impression that Father called them ‘small.’"

Amos died at age 84 in 1859 – and, if Dickinson did write “Went up a year this evening” in tribute to him, then perhaps the poem is misdated?

When exploring this  poem, I found an interesting interactive site – a virtual walking tour of Black Amherst called “Reorienting Dickinson,” HERE. “Old Amos” is mentioned at sites 2, “West Cemetery,” and 9, “Newport House.”

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Here's a pic from when I visited the Homestead, home of Emily Dickinson and her family in Amherst, MA, now the Emily Dickinson Museum.

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Ide Notice

Beware, everyone, ’tis the Ides of March!  But did you know that the “ides” for each month is NOT the 15th?

Here's a breakdown: 

15th Day of the Month: March, May, July, and October

13th Day of the Month: January, February, April, June, August, September, November, and December

Did Emily Dickinson ever use the word “ides” in any of her poems?

Nope.

Did she ever mention Caesar in any of her poems?

Yep.  In three poems:  “Great Caesar! Condescend,” “Knock with tremor,” and “The Child’s faith is new.”

She even mentioned Shakespeare in one poem, “Drama’s Vitallest Expression” (and she even gave “Hamlet” and “Romeo and Juliet” a shout out too).

Dickinson LOVED reading Shakespeare, and in a letter to Joseph Lymon she wrote, "Going home I flew to the shelves and devoured the luscious passages. I thought I should tear the leaves out as I turned them. Then I settled down to a willingness for all the rest to go but William Shakespeare. Why need we Joseph read anything else but him?"

By the way:  Joseph Lyman was a friend of Austin Dickinson, a beau of Lavinia Dickinson, and an admirer of Emily Dickinson, with whom he corresponded. 

Just curious, are there any Shakespeare fans out there who agree with Dickinson -- "why read anything else but him"?

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Irrational Decision

I have been writing about the poems by Emily Dickinson which editor William Hayes Ward accepted – or rejected – for publication in the New York Independent in 1891. However, since today is “Pi Day” (3.14), I thought I’d look into how often Dickinson used the word “Pi” (and “Pie”) in her poetry.

The first Pi Day celebration was organized by physicist Larry Shaw at the San Francisco Exploratorium in 1988 (and just FYI:  the 2015 Pi Day was called the "Pi Day of the Century" because its date in the day-month-year format was 3-14-15, which gives the first four digits of pi).  However, the concept of pi, the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, has ancient roots that date  back to the Babylonians and Egyptians, around 2000 BCE and 1650 BCE, respectively.  The first rigorous calculation of pi, using a geometrical approach with polygons, was devised by the Greek mathematician Archimedes around 250 BCE. 

Above: A Pi Skyline; for info, click HERE.

So did Dickinson ever use the word “pi” in any of her poems? 

Nope. 

However, Dickinson did use the word “circumference" in seventeen poems – or sixteen poems depending upon which version of “Two butterflies went out at Noon” you read.  The 1863 version does NOT include the word “circumference”; her version from 1878 does.

So back to pi:  Although Dickinson never used the word “pi,” she did use the word “pie.”  Well, not “pie” in the sense of a baked dish of fruit with a top and base of pastry.  Instead, she used “cap-a-pie,” derived from the Middle French phrase "de cap a pe", which means "from head to foot.”

“Cap-a-pie” appears in the opening lines to “Sic transit gloria mundi” (“thus passes the glory of the world”).  The complete poem (Dickinson’s longest) is HERE.

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Shall I Bloom?

In 1891, the editor of New York’s The Independent published a favorable review of the newly published Poems by Emily Dickinson, and then he wrote to Mabel Loomis Todd requesting additional poems to publish in his paper.  She sent him four, from which he printed three.  One of the three was “God made a little Gentian.”

As I explored this poem, I came across various sites analyzing the lines, and I happened upon this comment:

“Until its last line, ‘God made a little Gentian’ is a clever homily for children, a botanical version of red-nose Rudolf with frost instead of fog, including “It tried — to be a Rose — And failed — and all the Summer laughed —” Here's another:

“Like Fringed Gentian, ED is a ‘Creature’ of the North. ‘Snows’ and ‘Frosts’ remind her of the cold silence of Judeo-Christian God and stimulate her to ‘bloom’ poems, including this one. In Line 12 ED asks a pantheistic ‘Creator’ to get involved, ‘Shall I — bloom?’ Perhaps she wants a formal invitation, just for physical evidence that He exists. At any rate, bloom she did.”

One other interesting comment I came across:

“Lines referring to God begin and end the poem, the last line more intimate than the first. God is associated here with frost, winter and death. ED often describes a god that is indifferent (‘Apparently with no surprise to any happy flower, the frost beheads it at its play in accidental power . . . for an approving God’) and the creatures of his creation – small and insignificant (‘Victory comes late –- . . . God keeps His Oath to Sparrows – Who of little Love – know how to starve’). ED's god may note a sparrow falling, but doesn't intervene. This poem is in line with these others. But the insignificant here – the ‘little Gentian’ – has its own power, a royal purple color that shames all of nature – a power invoked by winter and death. It's a lovely poem.”

I remembered, too, that I had a book about Dickinson’s love of gardening, Emily Dickinson’s Gardening Life (The Plants & Places That Inspired the Iconic Poet) by Marta McDowell, and I wondered if the poem were included among its offerings.  It was not – although it does include the poem “The Gentian has a parched Corolla.”

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Jewel Thief

In 1891, the editor of New York’s The Independent published a favorable review of the newly published Poems by Emily Dickinson, and then he wrote to Mabel Loomis Todd requesting additional poems to publish in his paper.  She sent him four, from which he printed three.  One of the three was “I held a jewel in my fingers.”

How do you interpret this poem?  Metaphorically, is the “Jewel” a child? A beloved other?  Or could it be something completely different, like an idea for a poem which the poet cannot recall? 

Does the speaker blame herself for the loss?  She does rebuke herself – with a bygone form of “chide” – though her fingers seem to be faultless (i.e., they were “honest fingers”).

"Chid," by the way, was the standard past tense and past participle of “chide” until the early 20th century – and “chidden” was another variant for the past participle.

Is the memory of the lost “Jewel” of lesser value than the actual gem itself?  Take a look at this interpretation, HERE, from “Literary Gitane, Meanderings of a Literary Vagabond.”  I stumbled upon this blog when exploring “I held a Jewel in my fingers,” and to paraphrase Joni Mitchell, this blogger’s interpretation “looks at gems from both sides now.”

“This is one of my favorite Dickinson poems as I love the image of ‘an Amethyst remembrance.’ An amethyst is a semi-precious stone compared to the precious jewel. So one could argue that what remains is definitely less precious than what one has experienced. But it could be the opposite too. Isn’t it interesting that we don’t have a precise picture of the jewel but the description of the memory is more concrete? Our memories are often idealized versions of a past that was far from perfect. The colorful, lustrous and sparkling picture of the amethyst evoked at the end of the day and perhaps at the sunset of her life suffuses the poem in a violet glow. What a gem of a poem!”

Now, some current (relatively speaking) research has explored the ambiguous relationship between Emily Dickinson and her sister-in-law Susan.  Was it more than platonic? Could Susan have been the “Jewel”?

Since the poem refers to the missing gem as an “Amethyst remembrance,” I thought I’d look at Dickinson’s use of the word the “Amethyst” to see if that would offer up any clues.

The word “Amethyst” appears in six of Dickinson’s poems, and all of them are about the sunrise or sunset. In one of them, “The Daisy follows soft the Sun,” a flower follows the sun to explore "Night's possibility at the parting west. Dickinson’s nickname, by the way, was “Daisy.” 

If one interprets the Daisy following the Sun to be Dickinson, then the “Night’s possibility” – bathed in Amethyst – could give rise to an “Amethyst remembrance”; however, Dickinson refers to the Sun as a “Sir” in the poem – so at least in this case, in attempting to connect an “Amethyst remembrance” to Susan, I came up empty handed.

But here’s a little more food for thought:  Austin Dickinson married Susan Huntington Gilbert in 1856.  Dickinson wrote “I held a Jewel in my fingers” in 1861. However, she wrote “The Daisy follows soft the Sun” in 1859 (Johnson) or 1860 (Franklin). Furthermore, Dickinson traveled to Philadelphia in 1860 and met Charles Wadsworth, another possible love interest of Dickinson’s (some info is HERE). Sooo…I suppose Wadsworth could be in the Sun in the one poem, and Susan the “Amethyst remembrance” in the other?

Or, of course, I could be off base altogether.

By the way, Dickinson’s 1859 “Daisy” poem ends wondering about “the Amethyst / Night’s possibility” – and shortly after writing her 1860 “Jewel” poem, she penned “Wild Nights! Wild Nights!”

That poem ends, “Might I but moor – tonight / In thee!” 

Now who do you suspect she was thinking about with that poem?

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Three Out of Four Ain't Bad - Part 2

In late 1890, William Hayes Ward, an editor of The Independent in New York, published a favorable review of Emily Dickinson’s Poems (published posthumously); he then wrote to the book’s editor Mabel Loomis Todd and requested additional poems for his paper to publish. 

In January 1891, Todd sent him four poems, and within the month, Ward replied:

“Three of them I will take and print as soon as I may.  They are fresh and interesting.  One of them I return.  It seems to me so unsatisfactory in the way the last two verses are worked up.  I am afraid I fail to catch the meaning except generally.”

Which poems did he accept, which one did he return?

The rejected poem (“if my memory does not fail me,” wrote Todd’s daughter Millicent Todd Bingham in “Ancestors’ Brocades, the Literary Debut of Emily Dickinson”) was “Of tribulation these are they.”

Above: Why did Dickinson deliberately spell "ankle" wrong? (She had enclosed the poem in a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson and wrote on the bottom, "I spelled ankle wrong.") I'll provide details in an upcoming post.

The three poems which Ward accepted and published were “I held a jewel in my fingers,” “God made a little gentian,” and “Went up a year this evening.”

All three of these poems were included in the Second Series of “Poems” published later in that year. 

I'll take a look at these poems in the coming days!

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Three Out of Four Ain't Bad - Part 1

William Hayes Ward joined the editorial staff of the New York Independent in 1868 and remained with the Independent thereafter, rising by degrees to editor in chief (1896–1913), and then honorary editor.

Above: (Hmm...what is an "Assyriologist"?)

In 1890, after the debut of Emily Dickinson’s “Poems,” the paper published a review.  I could not find a copy of the complete review; however, I do know that it noted that her “modest verses … [are] piquant, spirited…and are cast in no conventional mold.”  It stated that the poems “bear the stamp of original genius. … there is nothing like these poems in the language.”

After the review appeared in the paper, Ward wrote to editor Mabel Loomis Todd and asked if there were other unpublished poems:  “If there are any others that compare with the best ones in the volume, I should like much to publish them in The Independent.”

In the letter he stated the following:

“I am thoroughly surprised at the excellence of the poems.  I have read them over and over at my home to my sisters, and three or four of them cling in my memory.  She had a real genius, and it is extraordinary that with her sense of poetic thought and her sense of metre too, she had absolutely no sense of rhyme.”

Evidently, rhyme was extremely important in the 19th century.

Anyway, in compliance with his request for additional poems, Todd and Lavinia Dickinson selected four poems to send to him in January 1891.

Within the month, Ward replied to thank her for the poems.

“Three of them I will take and print as soon as I may.  They are fresh and interesting.  One of them I return.  It seems to me so unsatisfactory in the way the last two verses are worked up.  I am afraid I fail to catch the meaning except generally.”

Which poems did he accept, which one did he return?

Stay tuned!

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Shifting Ground

Some of my recent poems have centered on Emily Dickinson’s use of rhymes – full rhymes, partial rhymes, other types of rhymes.  Some of them have examined whether or not partial or slant rhymes were used for poems of despair while full, traditional rhymes were used in poems of joy.

In “Positive as Sound, Emily Dickinson’s Rhyme,” Judy Jo Small examined other ways Dickinson used rhyme as well. 

“Another tactic Dickinson employs is the deliberate dislocation of a rhyme for a special semantic effect,” wrote Small.  “In the well known ‘After great pain, a formal feeling comes,’ the lines are arranged in rhymed couplets, except in the anomalous second stanza.

In the middle stanza, the unthinking ‘Wooden’ motion that continues in states of spiritual numbness is suggested not only by the idea of feet functioning mechanically without the guidance of the mind and will but also by the steady iambic movement that proceeds dully without regard to (‘Regardless’ of) stanzaic shape or placement of rhyme. ‘Ground’ rhymes perfectly with ‘round,’ but not at the end of the line where it would seem orderly and coherent.  Instead, it falls almost lost amid two unrhymed lines that move as if randomly, aimlessly, like the body whose soul is stupefied by  pain.  The word ‘Feet,’ then refers not only to human feet but, in a subsidiary way, to poetic feet.”

Interesting, huh?  But consider this.

Small’s book was published in 1990, eight years before R. W. Franklin published his “The Poems of Emily Dickinson.”  Therefore, she was likely basing her analysis on Thomas Johnson’s version of the poem in his 1955 edition of “The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson.”

Oddly enough, there are differences between the Johnson and Franklin versions of the poem, albeit subtle differences. First, the Franklin edition adds quotation marks in lines 3 and 4.  However, the more significant difference involves lines 6 and 7 – the order of these lines is reversed.

In Johnson’s version, “ground” comes just two syllables after “round.”  In Franklin’s version, “ground” comes six syllables later.  Does that matter when it comes to Small’s contention?  I suppose one could say “‘ground’ falls almost lost amid three unrhymed lines’ – or does the probability that Dickinson was aiming for an internal rhyme fall apart?

A bit more trivia about the poem: "After great pain a formal feeling comes" was first published in "The Atlantic" in February 1929. At that time, it was presented in three stanzas of 4 lines, 5 lines, and 6 lines. It later appeared in that same year in "Further Poems of Emily Dickinson.

In both publications, the Franklin/Miller version of the second stanza was used.

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Earth Tones

Yesterday I posted information related to the poem “Further in Summer than the birds.” There are six variations of this poem, and the first version – and the longest (with seven stanzas)  – was sent to Gertrude Lefferts Vanderbilt when she was recovering from a gunshot wound (she had been shot by a suitor her maid had rejected).

Dissatisfied with the final five stanzas, Dickinson substituted two new ones which created a four-stanza version that, with a few other tweaks, prevailed after that.

The word “minor” is used in the opening stanza, though seemingly in a non-musical way; however evidence that Dickinson intended a reference to music in the original poem is provided by the final two stanzas that were later eliminated – though they were included in the Johnson edition of Dickinson’s poetry as a stand alone poem, “The earth has many keys.”  

The earth has many keys, Where melody is not Is the unknown peninsula. Beauty is nature's fact. But witness for her land, And witness for her sea, The cricket is her utmost Of elegy to me.

The structure of these lines can seem a bit awkward.  The dependent clause of the second line connects with the third line so that it reads, “Where melody is not is the unknown peninsula”; i.e., there is no known location on earth where there is no “melody.”  

The message of the final four lines is certainly a fitting lament for our modern times:  when one “witnesses” what is happening to our land and seas due to climate change, the symbolic sound of “crickets” is the “utmost elegy” for an ailing planet. 

I composed music for this poem, and I challenged myself to use as many different chords as possible to reflect the earth’s “many keys.”  I also decided to write a slow, somber song to represent the “elegy” mentioned in the final line.

I ended up using eight different chords, and the progression is as follows (if you understand chords):

Intro:  Gm / Eb maj / Gm Eb maj /

Song: Gm / Eb maj / Gm / Eb maj / D7 / Eb maj / D7 / G7 / Cm Bb maj Ab maj  / Gm Ab maj / G7 / Cm / Ab maj / Cm /Ab maj / G

When I get a chance, I'll post a copy of the music. ;-)

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First of all, I’m loving following your E.D. Posts bc I love her and I like learning about her. What led you to do all this research and then what brought you to post it here on tumblr?

I’ve been a huge fan of ED since my days in middle school (my 8th grade teacher introduced me to her poetry). I have a site with Weebly, but their tech support is minimal & there have been problems — so now I’m posting on Weebly…but also Tumblr & Substack — just in case there are further issues with Weebly. My site is https://thedickinson.net I’ve been posting there since 2012 or 2013.

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Minor Changes

In my exploration of Dickinson’s sensitivity to and use of tonal qualities and shifts provided through different types of rhyme, I posted two poems recently which play on the term “minor.”  Yesterday, I posted one of them, “Further in Summer than the birds,” a poem which has some interesting bits of trivia associated with it.

First, there are six variations of this poem, and the longest version (with seven stanzas) was sent to Gertrude Vanderbilt.

And are you ready for this?

R. W. Franklin’s research states that this long version of the poem “was sent to Gertrude Vanderbilt, who was seriously injured in 1864 when shot by a suitor her maid had rejected.  During her recovery, ED sent several poems, including this one, signed ‘Emily,’ about late summer 1865.”

Say what?

My first exploration into “Gertrude Vanderbilt” led me to the Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney who founded the Whitney Museum in New York City, but this was not the correct Gertrude Vanderbilt (as she was not born until 1875).

Further research led me to Gertrude Lefferts Vanderbilt, and I discovered this information:

“The poem…(referred) to as the Vanderbilt variant of ‘Further in Summer than the Birds’ takes its name from its first reader, Gertrude Lefferts Vanderbilt (1824 – 1902) of Evans 8 Flatbush, Brooklyn, New York, to whom Dickinson mailed the poem during the summer of 1865. Although Dickinson and Vanderbilt likely never met in person, they knew each other through Dickinson’s close friend and sister-in-law Susan Dickinson, with whom Vanderbilt went to school. Vanderbilt suffered a near-fatal gunshot wound, a scandalous event that drew national attention. In what the Brooklyn Eagle and the Springfield Republican called ‘an attempt at revenge,’ a farm laborer named William Cutter, the spurned suitor of Vanderbilt’s servant Anne Walker, attacked and shot both Walker and Vanderbilt. Perhaps to aid Vanderbilt during her recovery, Dickinson sent four letter-poems to Vanderbilt during the year after her injury. The Vanderbilt variant of ‘Further in Summer than the Birds’ was one of them.”

And get this – another strange twist to the “Vanderbilt variant”:  

“For more than eighty years, scholars believed that the earliest version of Emily Dickinson’s ‘Further in Summer than the Birds,’ a major mid-career poem often regarded as ‘one of Dickinson’s finest’ (McSweeney 155) and ‘best-known poems,’ had been lost (Franklin, ‘The Manuscripts’ 552). They only knew of the existence of this elusive variant because Dickinson’s first editor, Mabel Loomis Todd, made a transcript in the 1890s, marking the last recorded sighting of Dickinson’s original manuscript before its mysterious disappearance…Yet, against all odds, the manuscript survived, resurfacing miraculously at Ella Strong Denison Library, the special collections library at Scripps College in Claremont, California, in 1986, exactly a century after Dickinson’s death.”

Dissatisfied with the final five stanzas, Dickinson substituted two new ones which created a four-stanza version that, with a few changes, prevailed after that.

Dickinson included this shortened version in a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson in 1866 in which she told him that her beloved dog “Carlo died”; she asked, “Would you instruct me now?”

Seventeen years later, in 1883, the poet returned to the poem and made two further copies.  In March 1883 she enclosed a two stanza version of the poem in a letter to Thomas Niles, referring to this one as “My Cricket” (i.e., a member of the “minor Nation” in line 3 that celebrates its “unobtrusive Mass”).  

Another version was prepared for Mabel Loomis Todd.  It also included a cricket wrapped in a piece of paper.

ONE LAST THING TO WONDER ABOUT:  When I Google-searched “Gertrude Lefferts Vanderbilt,” an entry popped up involving Edith Wharton’s novel “The Age of Innocence.”  In a list of “Minor Characters” from the book (hmm…there’s that word “minor” again), I spotted a character by the name of “Lawrence Lefferts,” a wealthy young man and a member of Archer's social circle, and his wife – who suspects that he is having an affair – is Mrs. Gertrude Lefferts,

Do you think that the “Gertrude Lefferts” in the book, written in 1920, has any connection at all to “Gertrude Lefferts Vanderbilt”? The time period highlighted in the book is the 1870s; Gertrude Lefferts, 1824 - 1902, lived in Brooklyn, and Edith Wharton grew up in New York City.

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Minor Role - Part 2

I’ve been writing about “acoustic shifts” – those brought on by major and minor keys in music or by full and partial rhymes in poetry – and Dickinson’s sensitivity to such shifts, and yesterday I discussed “Why – do they shut me out of Heaven,” a poem with partial rhymes and one that refers to a minor voice.

Today, I have another poem that plays on the word “minor," “Further in Summer than the birds.”

In the first stanza of this poem, the poet emphasizes the multitudes of crickets (and I’ll explain the crickets later) – now made obvious after the birds have migrated – and how they (i.e., this “minor nation”), en masse, celebrate their Mass when (as noted in the final two lines) “a Druidic Difference / Enhances Nature now.” 

Dickinson scholar Judy Jo Small, in Positive as Sound, Emily Dickinson’s Rhymes,  said this:  “(Dickinson’s) reference to the crickets as ‘A minor Nation’ surely includes the musical sense of the term ‘minor’; that term introduces an analogy between the mysterious (if not exactly ‘Druidic’) ‘Difference’ one feels between the minor and the major keys and the difference between the pensive, elegiac cricket songs of late summer and the songs of the birds earlier in the season.”

By the way, this poem transitions from full rhymes in the first stanza (“grass” and “Mass”), to partial rhyme in the second stanza (“grace” and “loneliness”) to no rhyme in the final stanzas (“low” and “typify,” and “glow” and “now”). If rhyme shapes a poem in a reader’s ear and works as an indicator of poetic structure, what might these shifts in rhyme indicate?

Finally, evidence that Dickinson intended a reference to musical keys in this poem is revealed  by two stanzas included in one variant version (there were as many as six variations of this poem); these stanzas, included in the Johnson edition as poem 1775, begin “The earth has many keys.” 

I’ll discuss those lines soon; however, tomorrow my plan is to cover some unusual bits of trivia associated with this poem (including how we know the “minor nation” is made up of crickets).

PART 1 of this post is HERE.

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Minor Role -- Part 1

Recent posts have been about the tonal quality of rhymes, specifically the sound of full, traditional rhymes as compared to slant or partial rhymes.

Yesterday’s post also included a few lines from a letter Emily Dickinson wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson which emphasized the poet’s “peculiar sensitivity to such acoustic shifts.” Here’s one line from that letter where she is talking about seasonal changes:

“These Behaviors of the Year hurt almost like Music – shifting when it ease us most.”

In her book “Positive as Sound, Emily Dickinson’s Rhymes,” Judy Jo Small spoke of the “phonic shifts of (Dickinson’s) rhymes” – and how these shifts revealed her “intuitive grasp of their affective value.”

One example where Small highlighted the poet’s “own sensitivity to the minor mode” was with the opening lines of poem 248:

Why – do they shut me out of Heaven? Did I sing—too loud? But—I can say a little "Minor" Timid as a Bird!

“It is tempting to speculate about connections she might have made between partial rhyme and the ‘Minor.’  Did partial rhyme seem to her more ‘Timid,’ more hesitant and tentative, than full rhyme?  Probably.”

In this poem, Dickinson did employ full rhyme in the second stanza (“more” and “door”), but kept to partial rhyme in the first and final stanzas:  (“loud” and “bird,” and “Robe” and “forbid”). 

I’ll have another poem that plays on the word “minor” tomorrow -- and that poem rhymes "low" with "typify." :-D

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Musical Shifts: The Tonal Qualities of Rhyme

In music, there is a definite joy and optimism to pieces written in major keys, and there is despair, gloom and loneliness in music written in minor keys.

Can the same be said of the tonal quality of poetry written with full, traditional rhymes as compared to those penned with slant or partial rhymes?

In her book Positive as Sound, Emily Dickinson’s Rhyme, Judy Jo Small reasoned that “partial rhyme is more ambiguous than full rhyme.” As a result, partial rhymes are more likely to obscure the reader’s “feeling of tonal center,” and this “creates ambiguity of expectation, disrupts a secure sense of acoustic progression, and…arouses suspense and tension.”

She asserts that Dickinson’s own proclivity for the minor mode and her “peculiar sensitivity to such acoustic shifts” is not only evident frequently in her poetry, but it is suggested by this passage in an 1872 letter to Higginson:

“When I saw you last, it was Mighty Summer – Now the Grass is Glass and the Meadow stucco, and ‘Still Waters’ in the Pool where the Frog drinks. These Behaviors of the Year hurt almost like Music – shifting when it ease us most.”

The full letter to Higginson can be found HERE.

A few comments…

For me, the “Behaviors of the Year hurt almost like Music” called to mind the fourth and fifth lines of “There’s a certain Slant of light” (the “Cathedral tunes” and “Heavenly Hurt”), the poem I highlighted in my previous post.

Don’t you just love that phrase, “these Behaviors of the Year”?

More from Small: This idea of Nature’s “musical shift” from Dickinson’s letter does not provide a “full-fledged rationale for the phonic shifts of her rhymes, but it does indicate at least her intuitive grasp of their affective value.”

By the way, this letter opens with a very famous line from Dickinson: “To live is so startling, it leaves but little room” for anything else!

Tomorrow I’ll continue this discussion and focus on her poem “The earth has many keys.”