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.
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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