“Even outsiders protested” (about issues with grammar) wrote Millicent Todd Bingham in “Ancestors’ Brocades,” her 1945 account of “Emily Dickinson’s Literary Debut.”
Bingham shared a letter from a school principal to Thomas Wentworth Higginson about the “lain”/”laid” issue in the two poems mentioned above, and across the top of that letter he wrote, “I have discouraged this” (i.e., making any change).
Between the third and fourth printing of the first edition of “Poems,” co-editor Mabel Loomis Todd wrote to Higginson to discuss some misprints in the book.
“The first (in the poem beginning ‘A wounded deer leaps highest’) is on page 20 – of which I wrote you some time ago – in the line ‘In which it cautious arm,’ printed “cautiONS, although I three times corrected it in the proof.” Later in the letter she wrote, “And on page 54 (in the poem ‘My river runs to thee’), in the last line, I am sure she intended it to be two lines instead, Say, sea, Take me! and that is very piquant and like her.” |
Finally, she re-visited the “lain”/”laid” issue in “I died for Beauty, but was scarce.”
Bingham wrote in “Ancestors’ Brocades,” “Except the last, all the suggested corrections were made. ‘Was lain’ remains to this day, as Mr. Higginson decreed.”