At One's Peril

From our master grammarian & resident logophile, Angstrom Dickinson:

I was glancing through my Twitter feed this evening, and I came across this quote:

"A poet can survive everything but a misprint."  ~Oscar Wilde

Very shortly after that, I came across Emily Dickinson's poem "Peril as a Possession" on Wikisource, and it appeared as follows:

​Peril as a Possesssion
'Tis Good to hear
Danger disintegrates Satiety
There's Basis there –
Begets an awe
That searches Human Nature's creases
As clean as Fire.

Of course, I noticed the misspelling of "possession" – I supposed that that was not how Dickinson had actually written the word (although there are some distinctive misspellings in her poems) – but "'Tis Good to hear" just didn't sit right with me.  Therefore, I checked my Johnson volume of Dickinson's poetry and my Franklin edition too.  Sure enough, the line should be "'Tis Good to bear."

Here's the Johnson version:

​Peril as a Possession
'Tis Good to bear
Danger disintegrates Satiety
There's Basis there –
Begets an awe
That searches Human Nature's creases
As clean as Fire.
​

Here's the Franklin version:

​Peril as a Possession
'Tis Good to bear
Danger disintegrates satiety
There's Basis there –
Begets an awe
That searches Human Nature's creases
As clean as Fire.
​

Both the Johnson and the Franklin editions had "'Tis Good to bear" (vs. "hear").  To be honest, the only difference between the two versions was a capital vs. a lower case "s" for the word "satiety," certainly a minor difference (however, there can be major differences presented in Dickinson's poems in the two volumes). 

I then checked the Dickinson Electronic Archives (HERE) for the poem just to see if they had a version of the lines in Dickinson's own handwriting.  Here is what I found:

So Oscar Wilde was correct, I suppose, "A poet can survive everything but a misprint."  I'll tell you what though – I'm not so sure how accurate Dickinson's poems would be if I were to be the one to transcribe them!  Her handwriting is certainly a challenge to read!


By the way –  that looks like a capital "S" for "Satiety" to me.