When you run a search for the word “king” on the online Dickinson Archive, 35 entries pop up, and they represent 13 different poems; however, that really depends on which edition of Dickinson’s poetry you check.
In the poem “When I hoped – I feared,” for instance, Miller’s edition includes the word “king” in the 7th line of the 8-line poem, and Johnson’s and Franklin’s editions do not.
Why the difference?
Franklin made this statement in his reading edition of Dickinson’s poems:
“About three fourths of the poems exist in a single source. For the rest, with from two to seven sources, the policy has been to choose the latest version of the entire poem, thereby giving to the poet, rather than the editor, the ownership of change.”
Of this particular poem, Franklin noted the following in his variorum edition:
“Three fair copies, variant, about 1863, 1865, and 1871. The earliest is in Fascicle 26…recorded about summer 1863….A variant copy in pencil, addressed ‘Sue’ and signed ‘Emily,’ was sent to Susan Dickinson about 1865…Some five years later, about November 1871, ED enclosed a copy with further variants in a letter to T. W. Higginson.”
Therefore, the copy from 1871 is what appears in Franklin’s edition, and the first copy from 1863 is what appears in Miller’s edition, “Emily Dickinson’s Poems As She Preserved Them” (“the first edition of Emily Dickinson’s poems to present in easily readable form Dickinson’s own-ordering of the poems she bound into forty handmade booklets between 1858 and 1864, and of the poems she copied onto unbound sheets between 1864 and 1875”).
By the way, the same version in the Franklin edition appears in the Johnson edition, and here is what Johnson said about the poems in his edition:
“Though by far the largest number of packet copies exist in but a single fair-copy version, several exist in semifinal form: those for which marginally the poet suggested an alternate reading for one word or more. In order to keep editorial construction to a bare minimum, I have followed the policy of adopting such suggestion only when they are underlined, presumably Emily Dickinson’s method of indicating her own preference.”