Okay, I thought I was onto something, something big. But no. I was wrong. Highly unusual, I know, but it's true. I was wrong.
Here’s the story: I’ve been writing about Dickinson’s poem “The Mushroom is the Elf of Plants.” The online Dickinson archive includes eight entries for this poem, and six of the eight include images of Dickinson’s manuscripts of the poem or portions of the poem. Yesterday, I discussed the eight entries (HERE) and shared the six images of Dickinson’s own handwriting – and her cousin Frances’ handwriting too (in a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson about the poem).
Here’s the story: I’ve been writing about Dickinson’s poem “The Mushroom is the Elf of Plants.” The online Dickinson archive includes eight entries for this poem, and six of the eight include images of Dickinson’s manuscripts of the poem or portions of the poem. Yesterday, I discussed the eight entries (HERE) and shared the six images of Dickinson’s own handwriting – and her cousin Frances’ handwriting too (in a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson about the poem).
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Also, during a recent daily run, I passed some magnificent mushrooms on the side of the road – so magnificent that I stopped to snap a few pictures. Then, later, when I read and re-read Dickinson’s poem, I was convinced that in the third line, she meant that the mushroom, the elf of plants, was in a “truffled HAT” – not a “truffled HUT.” I mean, look at those pictures. Doesn’t it look like the fungi are wearing spectacular Victorian hats?
| Anyway, I took a closer look at Dickinson’s handwriting in some of the images provided in the archive just to prove my point. Afterall, I’d recently discovered an error where the word “and” in the poem “A train went through a burial gate” was mistyped as “arid.” I alerted Harvard Libraries about this, and I heard back, “Thanks for taking the time to report the error. You’re right, it’s definitely an OCR error. It will eventually get corrected, in the next round of updates” BTW: an OCR is an “Optical Character Recognition,” a technology that converts scanned images of text into machine-readable and searchable digital text – and the scanner had picked up “arid” for “and.” |  |
Well, I was ready to fire off another email about my find – “hat” instead of “hut” – but like I said, I investigated a bit further. I compared Dickinson’s “a” to her “u” in portions of the poem, and now…well, I believe she wrote “hut,” not “hat.”
I still think the mushrooms look like they’re wearing hats. LOL.
I still think the mushrooms look like they’re wearing hats. LOL.
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