Category: Franklin Variorum

A Puzzlement

8/7/2026

In 1862 Emily Dickinson wrote “Because I could not stop for Death":

Below: Proof of Life pic for Emily Dickinson: I'm tellin' y'all -- she could not stop for Death!

The poem was first published posthumously in 1890 in Poems, edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth. They modified the poem considerably.

They omitted the fourth stanza completely, and they altered the third stanza so that “done” would provide a perfect rhyme with “sun.”

To be honest, whenever I see a published collection of poems by Dickinson, I always check “Because I could not stop for Death” first. I look to see if the book includes the poem “as written” – or “as edited.”

Then, early last month, I came across a third version of this poem, one I’d never seen before. In this version, the stanza reads as follows:

Oddly enough, I first encountered this new version while listening to an album by Julie Harris reciting selected poems by Dickinson. I wrote about it HERE.

Upon learning of this “new” version, I turned to the Frank Variorum, and there – at the conclusion of his discussion of the poem – was this comment about line 10:

At wrestling in a ring CP24 (i.e., The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, published in 1924).

I also checked the Dickinson archive, and one entry for the poem includes this comment:

When the poem was included in CP (1924) and later collections, the fourth stanza was still omitted. There are the same alterations in lines 9, 20, and 21, but line 10 is altered in a different way: At wrestling in a ring

NOW HERE'S WHERE MY PUZZLEMENT COMES IN:

Following the success of Poems, Todd published two other series of Poems in 1891 and 1896. Additionally, in 1914, Martha Dickinson Bianchi published a volume of previously unpublished poems by Dickinson in a volume entitled "The Single Hound.”

Then, in 1924, Little, Brown, and Company published The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson.

This book was not an edition of previously unpublished poems. Instead, it was simply a “complete set” of the earlier four volumes: Poems; Poems, Second Series; Poems, Third Series; and The Single Hound. Therefore, one would expect that The Complete Poems would contain the works as previously published in the four earlier publications, end of story. And that is true for the most part – except “Because I could not stop for Death” was changed. The third stanza now included what I call the “third” version of the poem (with “At wrestling in a ring”).

Below: "Because I could not stop for Death" in the 1924 edition of The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson:

The 1924 edition includes an introduction by Martha Dickinson Bianchi. Did she edit the poems? OR – perhaps based on my discussion with Mimi at the Frost Library – did she (or someone else involved with the publication) possess a copy of the poem with this version of line 10?

It’s interesting to note that line 9 maintains Mabel Loomis Todd’s altered wording (“We passed the school where children PLAYED") although it preserves Dickinson’s “rhyme” of “ring” and “sun.” However, let me add that I could not find any manuscript with the line "wrestling in a ring" as a possible substitute for line 10 in Dickinson's own handwriting.

If The Complete Poems was meant merely to be a reprint of the first four volumes, why was this particular poem changed? And who made the decision to make this change? To be honest, I did not compare other poems in the book to the previous editions to see if other changes had been made – LOL – I suppose that will be a future project. I will add, though, that it was great fun to discuss the various possibilities behind all of this with Mimi at the Frost Library.

AN ADDITIONAL TWIST:

On the same day as my visit to the Frost Library, my sister, my wife and I drove back to the Boston area – we were to depart for home the next morning. We made it to Medford in the late afternoon, and just after dinner, I walked up to the town’s public library.

Any time I visit a bookstore or library, I always check to see what Dickinson they have on the shelves. Below: Me checking for Dickinson at the Medford Public Library.

The Medford library included four volumes on Dickinson. One in particular was called Dickinson, Collected Poems.

I was quite surprised when I opened to the table of contents. This books was literally a reprint of The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, the volume published in 1924 – with the addition at the end of the book of two essays, one by Thornton Wilder and one by Elizabeth Jennings. But check out the table of contents; this volume includes Poems from 1890; Poems, Second Series from 1891, Poems, Third Series from 1896, and The Single Hound from 1914 – just like the 1924 volume. The book's introduction (below, far right) states, "“This edition gathers the first four volumes of Dickinson’ poetry, complete with their introductions and preludes.”

However – are you ready for this – it does NOT include the 1924 version of “Because I could not stop for Death”; instead, it includes the1890 version from Mabel Loomis Todd's Poems – which is the version I had expected to see in the 1924 compilation – but that change was made (with "wrestling in a ring") in the 1924 edition. Thus, my puzzlement.

Looks like I'll have to keep wrestling with this.

(LOL -- did you see what I did there?)

More info and pics are on my travelogue, "Dial 'Em' for Emily," -- including my final shot from Amherst (a gas station) -- AND -- my final pic from Boston (South Station where we boarded our train to head home), HERE.

This wraps up my travelogue, and today's post is the final post concerning our trip -- from New York to Boston/Medford to Amherst to Boston again to home -- aside from upcoming posts related to Dickinson's poetry associated with The Complete Poems of Dickinson I reviewed at the New York Public Library at the start of my trip.

More posts from my trip are here:

08.06.2026: BITS AND PIECES – & A PUZZLEMENT, CLICK HERE.
08.05.2026: THE ARTIFACTS OF LIFE, CLICK HERE.
08.04.2026: ONE GOOD TOUR DESERVES ANOTHER, CLICK HERE.
08.03.2026: ENETER THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP, CLICK HERE.
08.02.2026: FUN WITH JIM AND EMILY, CLICK HERE.
08.01.2026: THE BIG SLEEP, CLICK HERE.
07.31.2026: A WICKED ADVENTURE IN THE HUB OF THE UNIVERSE, CLICK HERE.
07.30.2026: PAINT BY BLUNDERS, CLICK HERE.
07.29.2026: YABBA DABBA DO BE DO BE DO WOP BOP A LOO BOP A LOP BAM BOOM DEE AY, CLICK HERE.
07.28.2026: NOT YOUR GARDEN VARIETY, CLICK HERE.
07.27.2026: THE TROUBLES WITH EMILY, CLICK HERE.
07.26.2026: THE MAN WHO BLOGGED TOO MUCH, CLICK HERE.
07.25.2026: STRANGE TURNS ON A TRAIN, CLICK HERE.
07.24.2026: HOW SWEETEST IT IS, CLICK HERE.
07.23.2026: A DATE WITH DESTINY, CLICK HERE.
07.22.2026: THIS – IS THE BLOG POST – THE SUNSET WASHES, CLICK HERE.
07.21.2026: DOUBLE ETERNITY, CLICK HERE.
07.20.2026: THE ORACLE WORE A WHITE DRESS -- PART DEUX, CLICK HERE.
07.19.2026: ALL THINGS MATTER, CLICK HERE.
07.18.2026: INTRODUCTORY PLOG POST ABOUT "DIAL 'EM' FOR EMILY," CLICK HERE.

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Who Am I to Disagree?

7/8/2026

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In yesterday’s post, I discussed Helen Vendler’s take on Dickinson’s use of the dash. In brief: “Her dashes served a multitude of purposes,” noted Vendler in Dickinson, Selected Poems and Commentaries. She added, “The dash becomes especially significant when it concludes a poem.”

Also in the post, I discussed one poem, “If recollecting were forgetting,” of which Dickinson wrote two versions – one with dashes (published in Miller 2016) and one without (published in Franklin 1998). Furthermore, I shared “‘Lethe’ in my flower,” a poem with no dashes, but a work which survived only in the form of a transcription produced by Mabel Loomis Todd – the original manuscript either lost or destroyed. Did Todd alter the poem to “clean up” Dickinson’s punctuation and eliminate the dashes? After all, she was known for modifying the poet’s punctuation and grammar to make her poems more palatable for public taste.

Vendler provided an interesting twist on this theme:

Vendler concluded her proposed transcription with this:

“As we compare the two possibilities, which seems more Dickinsonian? And what inference does a final dash allow that Todd’s terminal period does not?”

As I prepared today’s post and revisited Vendler’s text, I observed that I’d written a note to myself on the page, “LOL see recent post on the…”?

“Bunny”? Does that say “bunny”? Or does it say “bumnyl”? What the hell did I write – and what was my past-self trying to remind my present-self?

It took me a bit to figure it out, but it does say “see recent post on the bunny.” Thisnote to myself was a cue to revisit a post from the end of April which focused on one individual’s query, “How would famous writers rewrite this sentence in their style: A bunny was looking for a carrot.”

I didn’t think their proposed response for Emily Dickinson sounded very Dickinson-esque, so I attempted to compose one myself that sounded more Dickinsonian (a la Vendler’s reflection above). My post is HERE.

Below: Variances in punctuation and spelling in Dickinson's "My life closed twice before its close":

NOTES RE: ABOVE CHART:

* From Franklin’s The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Variorum Edition.

** I have no idea why Johnson added a dash at the end of the opening line of the poem.

# Franklin: At the time she transcribed the poem, Todd wrote “[disclose}” next to line 3, apparently as a potential editorial alteration.

Emendation: 1 it’s] its even numbers 2-8] indented 6 befell] befel

## Miller: “Befel” may be MLT’s mistake (it was emended by RWF), but it may also be ED’s anachronistic spelling; it is used by Shakespeare and by Isaac atts, albeit rarely.

Left: "My life closed twice before its close" in the 1924 "The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson; the title "Parting," given my Mable Loomis Todd, was not used in this edition.

Below left and right: The poem as it appeared in the June 1896 issue of Scribner's Magazine. The Scribner's version of the poem is the only one to use the word "this" in line 6 of the poem instead of "these" (which reminds me of the Eurythmics' "Sweet dreams are made of this...vs these" line in their song).

Below: Click Annie Lennox's eyes to hear "Sweet Dreams are Made of This" (not These):

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Formatting Issues

11/10/2025

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Toward the end of October, I published a post on Dickinson’s “It ceased to hurt me, though so slow.” The post is HERE.

In the post, I included this note from Franklin’s Variorum edition of Dickinson’s poems:

“PUBLICATION: ‘Atlantic Monthly,’ 143 (February 1929), 186, and FP (‘Further Poems’) (1929), 189, with stanza 3 omitted and the rest as three stanzas of 6, 4, and 4 lines; in later collections, as three quatrains. The entire poem, arranged as three quatrains and a final couplet, was published in Bingham, New England Quarterly, 20 (March 1947), 36, from a transcript of A (Amherst College).”

I added the comment, “I’ll explore today and see if I can find any of those adaptations.”

Fast forward to today. I looked into this, and the altered poems as mentioned by Franklin are below.

First, in the February 1929 edition of the Atlantic Monthly, the poem was, indeed, published without the third stanza.

Why would the editor have omitted a stanza? Mabel Loomis Todd’s daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham, addressed that issue in the March 1947 edition of the New England Quarterly where the poem was published, though in an altered format – as described by Franklin in his note above.

I’ve included the first page of Bingham’s article with the poem in the pic below.

So how should the poem read? How should it be formatted? Below is the original manuscript by Dickinson. How would you publish it?

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No Kings

6/14/2025

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I’m going to put off what I had planned for today and shift gears. Since my wife and I are going to the NO KINGS protest in town, I thought I’d look into how often Dickinson used the word “king” in her poetry.

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.”

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On The Run

11/17/2024

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I ran the Richmond Half Marathon yesterday, and I have to admit – I did better than I thought I would. Earlier in the year I set a goal to run the race in two and half hours, but the summer heat wave, the fall monsoons, work, some family commitments, and travel played havoc with my training – so my goal shifted to “just finish the race without falling over.” But surprise, surprise – I ran the course in just under two and a half hours!

Miracles do happen! LOL.

Sooo…did Dickinson ever use the word “marathon” in any of her poems? Nope. However, she did use the word “run.”

If you run a search on “run” (no pun intended) on the online Dickinson archive, 110 entries pop up, and this represents 45 poems – not 110 poems, because different variations of the same poem are always displayed. For example, “I taste a liquor never brewed” is listed four times, and “Could I but ride indefinite” shows up three times.

Then you have something like this: “It sounded as if the air were running” shows up 3 times, and “It sounded as if the streets were running” pops up twice – but the five entries really represent one poem with slightly different first lines.

Thomas Johnson’s notes on this poem can be found HERE.

Sooo…from what I can tell, the 110 entries for “run” represent 44 different poems.

More on “It sounded as if the streets were running” tomorrow.

CONTINUED...

Yesterday I looked into the word “run” used in Dickinson’s poetry: When searching the Dickinson online archive, 110 entries popped up for the word “run” representing 44 different poems.

Of the 110 entries, the first line “It sounded as if the air were running” showed up three times, and “It sounded as if the streets were running” was there twice.

Franklin’s research revealed that there were four variants of this poem: “The earliest is a pencil draft on a fragment of stationery” from 1877. Also, “Another pencil draft – on a fragment of stationery, with practice signatures on the reverse – changed the first noun to “Streets” and reworked the concluding metaphor, though retaining “apron” readings as alternative.”

Franklin also mentioned that “ED began the first line with “It –” but canceled it, only to begin with the same word again.”

Mention of this poem shows up in Cristanne Miller & Domhnall Mitchell’s volume “The Letters of Emily Dickinson” because she enclosed the third variation of the poem (along with others) in a letter to friend and mentor Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

In the letter, Dickinson referred to this poem as a “Gale,” and wrote the following:

“You asked me if I wrote now?
I have no other Playmate –
I send you a Gale (i.e., “It sounded as if the Streets were running”), and an Epitaph – and a Word to a Friend, and a Blue Bird, for Mrs. Higginson. Excuse them if they are untrue –”

She ended the letter “Since you cease to teach me, how could I improve?” and signed it, “Your pupil.”

The complete letter is HERE.

In her letter, Dickinson asked Higginson to “Excuse them (i.e., her poems) if they are untrue –” – but this poem rings particularly true to me – so many wonderful images in such a short poem – and I love the final lines – when people emerge from their shelters “To see if Time was (still) there” – and that image of Nature in her “Opal Apron / Mixing fresher Air.” Dickinson at her best!

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E Books? No -- ED Books!

10/8/2024

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A few updates on some of my upcoming reading material…

First, I splurged this year for my birthday, and I ordered Franklin’s Variorum edition of Dicksinon’s poetry. I have a couple (wornout) copies of his “readers edition,” his “complete” volume of Dickison’s poems; however, this three-volume edition includes all of the extant variations of each of the poems along with all of Franklin’s notes and research.

That package arrived yesterday! Woo hoo!

Also, as you can see from the chart below, Mabel Loomis Todd and her daughter Millicent Todd Bingham published a “second debut” of Dickinson’s works in 1945 entitled “Bolts of Melody: New Poems by Emily Dickinson.”

I’ve ordered a copy of the book – AND – I found a review of the book from 1945 – so I’ll be checking those out soon!

Interestingly, I ordered the book through this company based in Ashville, NC; their website included this info about “Rebuilding Lives After Hurricane Helene," HERE.

I’m not quite sure where the title “Bolts of Melody” comes from. Dickinson wrote eight poems with the word “bolt” and nineteen with the word “melody,” but I could not find one poem with both “bolts” and “melody.”

I ran a couple of Google-searches, but I kept getting directed to info about the first studio album “Bolts of Melody” by Adam Franklin, “an English guitarist, singer, and songwriter who is the front-man of the alternative rock band Swervedriver (1989–99, 2007–present) as well as the main creative force behind Toshack Highway (1999–2006) and currently releases records under his own name with his touring band Bolts of Melody” (info is from Wikipedia).

Hmm…I wonder if Franklin is a Dickinson aficionado?

I also have an article to read entitled, “The Elizabeth Whitney Putnam Manuscripts and New Strategies for Editing Emily Dickinson’s Letters.”

The article begins with this:

“In August 1976 Harvard University’s Houghton Library acquired thirteen Dickinson manuscripts from Elizabeth Whitney Putnam, a manuscript group that includes both poetry and prose. Three manuscripts were previously unknown, ten considered lost or destroyed.”

If interested, that article can be found HERE.

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A Puzzlement

Who Am I to Disagree?

Formatting Issues

No Kings

On The Run

E Books? No -- ED Books!

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