Category: Dickinson Lexicon

March to a Different Tune

3/6/2026

My recent posts have centered on Dickinson’s poem “After all Birds have been investigated and laid aside,” and the series began when I looked into Dickinson’s use of the word “March,” the month, vs. the verb “to march.” As I was exploring this, I learned that another meaning for “march” is “border,” as in the border area between two countries, “especially between England and Wales or (formerly) England and Scotland.”

Here are two of the various entries for “march” from the OED:

Some of the OED’s examples of usage for “march” as the noun that caught my eye are these:

* From 1398: “The Erle of the Marche, wardain of the est marche of Scotland.” That one just sounded funny to me.

* From 1820: “Ye were younger than me I could swear, When ye ran o'er the march wi' my father.”

This is from a poem in the early 1800s written by John Johnstone, and that’s what caught my eye – my wife’s family’s name is “Johnstone.” And like the cherry atop the sundae, I was able to find the very poem the line is from, “O! Mither, I’se Gaun To Be Married” (see below). It’s from a section of the book on Johnstone’s songs. The lines quoted are the last two lines fo the poem.

* From 1996: “Wimberry tarts and pies are sold in pubs around Shropshire and the Marches.” What’s a “wimberry” you ask? Well, I had to ask – so I looked it up and found this: “a wimberry (or whinberry, bilberry, blaeberry) is a small, wild, dark-blue European berry closely related to the American blueberry.”

Concerning the verb, “to border,” these examples of usage caught my eye:

* From 1515: “Orayly is the strongeyst Iryshe rebell that marcheyth with the countye of Meathe.” Again, I just thought that one sounded funny.

* From 1533: “Ioynynge to thys Erledome there marched a duchy” – which I assumed they passed from the left hand side. #iykyk

By the way, I also learned that “march” is also a term for “wild celery” and “the spoor of an otter.”

Concerning celery:

* From 1525: “Apium is an herbe that men do call Smalache, other Merche” And no, Apium is not related to opium. Apium is in the celery family; conversely, opium is derived from the dried latex of the opium poppy.

* From 1866: “March, an old name of Parsley” – an entry from Treasury of Botany by John Lindley and Thomas Moore – and lo and behold, I found a copy online!

Concerning the spoor of an otter:

* From the early 1400s: “Men clepen þat steppes or þe marches of þe Otere, as men clepe þe trace of þe hert.” This is from “The Master of Game" (info HERE), the oldest English-language book on hunting, translated into English by Edward of Norwich, 2nd Duke of York, between 1406 and 1413, of which 27 manuscripts survive.

* From 1575: “The Footing or the foote..Of an Otter..is to be called the Markes, or the Marches.” This is from “The Noble Are of Hunting by George Gascoigne.

Then, back at the Dickinson Lexicon, just under “March,” I spy the word “marge,” defined as “border; edge” – and my brain thinks to itself, “marge, march, marge, march. I bet these two words are related” – …but maybe not?

The etymon for “marge” is French “marge,” meaning “edge, border,” and it’s related to the margin of a book.

The etymon for “march” is French marche, from Anglo-Norman marche, Old French marche border, border territory (c1100), ultimately < the Germanic base of Old English mearc mark (I assume related to “mark” time?).

Suddenly a glitch in the matrix, aka a bit of deja vu: I suddenly remember that I wrote of Dickinson’s use of “marge” a few months ago, HERE.

And what of words that sound related but aren’t? More on this tomorrow. Stay tuned.

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Prest Conference

12/17/2025

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Yesterday I wrote on the use of the apostrophe in poetry to elide a vowel sound – particularly with the past tense ending, “-ed” – so that a line’s rhythm would flow with the meter of the rest of the poem. That discussion led me to examine Joyce Kilmer’s use of “prest” – instead of “pressed” or “press’d” – in his well-known poem “Trees.” I finished my post with this: “For now, I'll press on, and close with -- you guess'd it -- a pressing question: Did Emily Dickinson ever use the word ‘prest’ in any of her poems? You'll find out tomorrow!”

Well, “tomorrow” is today, so did Dickinson ever use “prest”? As a matter of fact, she did.

The word “press” numbers five definitions in the Dickinson lexicon (“prest” does not show as a separate entry), and she used the word in seven different poems: “press” in four poems, “pressed” in two, and “prest” in one. The single poem with “prest” is “’Twas the old road through pain” – and what a lovely and poignant poem it is – with possibly even a clever bit of humor.

The poem is a simple elegy for an unnamed woman, now in Heaven – hence too far from sight to hear the mourners’ “hoarse Good Night.” The greater portion of the poem recounts the woman’s journey through life, albeit an unhappy one (with “pain” and “thorn”) – and it is within those opening lines of the first stanza that there could be a bit of Dickinson drollery. She implies that the road to Heaven is the “unfrequented one,” soo…am I to understand that – where two paths diverge – the road not taken, descending to that other place, is the more congested one?

The second and third stanzas are touching as the speaker recounts a few simple details from the dead woman’s past. “Prest” shows up in line 8, “The little tracks – close prest –” And there is another feature of the poem that adds to its power – and that is the profusion of dashes bestrewn throughout the poem (LOL – how often do you get to use the word, “bestrewn”?).

There are forty-plus dashes among the twenty-two lines, and they serve to intensify the melancholy of the slow and deliberate meter of the poem. It is surely meant to be read slowly, thoughtfully, if not somberly – and the dashes force upon the reader a doleful pace. As a result, they add to the mood created by such words as old, pain, stops, rested, “not so swift,” slow (repeated twice), weary, stopped, and worn.

Check out the seven lines of the second stanza too. Each begins with a “th” sound as the speaker encapsulates the dearly departed’s life as if a tour guide were ticking off the core points of her quotidian journey.

Then, abruptly, two exclamations: “Wait! Look!” The speaker has discovered a book – a diary? – with a dog-eared corner on a page, a page of love. Hmm, the significance of “turned back” in that suddenly seems to dilate. I’m reminded of more Frost, the penultimate line from “Out, out –”: “No more to build on there.”

The entire poem is, indeed, a touching lamentation, and – if you’ll indulge with a bit of silly wordplay – I’m quite imprest.

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Fall Silent

11/11/2025

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In my post from November 5th, I shared Dickinson’s poem “Glowing is her Bonnet.” At the time, I was commenting on the use of the word “rill,” a word with which I was unfamiliar. I first ran across it two days prior in William Cullen Bryant’s poem “The Death of the Flowers.” I included that poem in this post, HERE.

As you can see below, the word “rill” was somewhat more common in 1850 than it is today, and Dickinson used it in two poems.

I ended my post on the 5th with the comment, “So that’s the real deal on ‘rill.’ Now – from line 3 of ‘Glowing is her bonnet’ – what is a ‘kirtle’?” -- another word with which I was unfamiliar.

According to the Dickinson Lexicon, a “kirtle” is a “Gown; petticoat; mantle; cape; short jacket; upper garment; [fig.] blossom; cluster of petals at the top of a flax flower.”

I also checked the OED: “kirtle”: “a. A woman’s gown. B. A skirt or outer petticoat” (and also “A man's tunic or coat, originally a garment reaching to the knees or lower, sometimes forming the only body-garment, but more usually worn with a shirt beneath and a cloak or mantle above”). Again, a word more commonly used in the mid-1800s.

To be honest, though, beyond a check on the word “kirtle,” I wanted to revisit this poem to discuss a bit of word play found in lines 5 and 11.

The poem itself is a study of a dead woman, though the start of the poem might throw you off. Through anaphora, a poetic device where the poet repeats a word or phrase at the start of successive lines, and through the present tense use of “is,” the subject of this poem seems at first to be thriving – after all, she is “glowing.” Mirroring the final stanza, though, where the sun is “looking” for the face of a now vanished daisy, the first stanza merely recounts a view of the woman, as silent now as the daisy that has vanished from what was once the summer’s hill.

Hmm…is this poem in some way revelatory? I alluded to a bit of word play above, and there, concealed in plain sight in line 5, is Dickinson’s nickname, “Daisy.” Did she see her own voice “silenced” in a future beyond her lifetime, at once “vanished” and “unrecorded,” with her poetry undiscovered, unpublished, and long forgotten?

The second bit of hidden wit hints at the craft of poetry itself with the word “feet” neatly positioned in the middle of line 11. On the surface of the third stanza, a “loving sunrise” searches for the missing daisy, as an “unnumbered” queue of mourners pause “at the place.” With the word “feet,” though, Dickinson subtly suggests the art of poetry where the "foot” is the basic unit of meter – and in this stanza, the feet are “unnumbered” and “paused.”

Do you pick up on anything else in this poem?

One other bit of trivia:

This poem was sent to Susan Dickinson as a “letter,” and notes on the Dickinson archive state this about the original manuscript:
“Half sheet torn at left. Grocery list appears on verso: ‘candles, raisins, breakfast.’ Commas are up above the line, as if they are exclamations without points. ‘Y's’ in ‘by’ in last stanza parallel one another.”

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Let the Chips Fall Where They May

10/13/2025

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Back in August, my wife and I visited a museum of parade floats. The exhibition displayed a host of floats that had been featured in the Rose Bowl Parade, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, various presidential inauguration parades and more. Following that visit, I published a post about the day a circus parade passed by Emily Dickinson’s home (HERE), and my next post (HERE) discussed Dickinson’s use of the word “parade” in a handful of her poems.

On that same day back in August, following our visit to the float museum, we toured a potato chip factory. Talk about an exciting day, huh? We were not allowed to take photographs inside the plant where workers prepared the potatoes and then fried and bagged the chips; however, we could take pics in and around the gift shop/snack bar – see below for a few.

In response to that tour, I searched the online Dickinson archive to see if the poet ever used the word “chip” in any of her poems – and as a matter of fact, she did. She used the word “chips” in “My Portion is Defeat – today,” a poem which uses war as the central metaphor for whatever “defeat” the speaker in the poem had experienced.

Is the poem about the Civil War? It was written in 1862 (Johnson) or 1863 (Franklin). Or was something going on in the speaker’s life that resulted in such physical and emotional defeat as to liken it to war?

The word “chips” appears in the tenth line, “And Chips of Blank – in Boyish Eyes.” And what, exactly, are “Chips of Blank”?

The Dickinson lexicon provides this bloated definition related to Dickinson’s one-time use of the word “chips”: “Fragment; bit; shard; small piece; fragment of a broken-off whole; [phrase “Chips of Blank”] fixed pupils; a frozen stare; an empty gaze.” Obviously, it is the tail-end to that rambling definition that is intended here.

Was “Chips of Blank” a common phrase? Not that I can tell. It seems to be a descriptive coinage of Dickinson’s with the dead boys’ eyes portrayed as blank chips.

A very thorough analysis of the poem can be found HERE, at The Prowling Bee, where blogger Adam Degraff interpreted the second stanza with this:

“Defeat is populated with the bones of soldiers and the stain of blood, with dead bodies so stiff they can no longer stoop, with piles of men moaning in pure agony, with dead boys who now have blank chips for eyes. (“chips” -what a word choice.) The dead boys are holding scraps of prayer, perhaps bible pages. (This is as biting a line about faith as Dickinson has yet written.) And then there is that final haunting image; the way the faces of the dead still show the surprise of death, as if the soldiers were statues carved in stone.”

Another analysis, HERE, opens with, “this poem explores the aftermath of defeat, contrasting its somber reality with the fanfare and celebration associated with victory” -- and that certainly calls to mind Dickinson’s earlier poem (from 1859), “Success is counted sweetest.”

Both poems focus on the defeated to emphasize the exultation beheld in victory – and I love how Dickinson hit just about every faculty of human perception to express the feeling. She deftly incorporates each of the five senses (except smell?), and in exploring this, I found the ancient Greek word αίσθηση (aesthesee): sensation, sense, perception, feeling, impression, notion. Dickinson certainly hit all of those!

Are there any readers old enough to remember ABC’s program “Wide World of Sports”? The show opened with these lines which encapsulate the two poems:

“Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sports… the thrill of victory… and the agony of defeat… the human drama of athletic competition.”

Now who’s ready for some potato chips and more Dickinson poetry? I betcha can’t eat – or read – just one!

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On the Square

9/17/2025

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In yesterday’s post, I shared info about the date, 9/16/25, a “triple perfect square” date – and then I looked into how many times Dickinson used the word “square” in her poetry. Two times, to be exact; once in “Grief is a mouse,” and once in “I could die to know.” In neither poem did she use “square” in a mathematical sense of a squared number; instead, she used it more in terms of a “public square” – at least that is the case with “Grief is a mouse.” That poem includes the line, “Burn Him in the Public square.”

In “I could die to know,” the word seems to suggest a “public square,” but I think that it is open to other interpretations as well, and the online Dickinson Lexicon appears to support this notion.

I checked the Lexicon to see how Dickinson used the word “square” in her writings, and it offered two definitions:

A tool used for measurement.
Open space or area in a town or city.

Of course, that second definition was used in “Grief is a mouse.” Dickinson literally wrote “public square” in that poem. Does that mean the other definition was used in “I could die to know”? Is the term suggesting “a tool used for measurement”?

Interestingly, the lexicon also provides a definition for Dickinson’s use of “squarely.” The entry states, “See ‘square’; Directly; honestly; in a straightforward manner.”

Oddly enough, though, Dickinson never used the word “squarely” in any of her poems. Only “square” – in the two poems I’ve already mentioned.

In the second poem, “I could die to know,” in the line “To the very Square – His foot is passing,” does Dickinson mean that, as she dreams from her bed, this unseen lover is walking past the public square as cart loads of coal are rattling and rolling past? Does the line also imply that as she dozes in bed when the town comes to life as “Morning's bold face stares in the window,” her lover passes on foot – and everything in life is as it should be, “To the very Square,” calculated and measured precisely?

I gotta say, that capital “H” with him adds to the mystery. Is she talking about “him,” or is she talking about “HIM”? LOL – this made me think of lyrics from Lady Gaga’s song “Born This Way”: “It doesn’t matter if you love him / Or capital ‘H-I-M” – and “God makes no mistakes.”

Okay, so let me wax profoundly a bit – or certainly a bit left of kilter: If the “he” in the poem is “HE” – and not merely “he” – then check out that first line again: “I could die – to know.” Hmm…the speaker will not know if this passer-by even returns her feelings – until she dies? And…does this passer-by even exist? Or is HE merely a part of her dream?

How is that for a measured response? Is it even on the square?

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March to a Different Tune

Prest Conference

Fall Silent

Let the Chips Fall Where They May

On the Square

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