Recent posts have focused on Emily Dickinson’s use of the word “lain” in her poem “I died for Beauty” when the correct word in that instance was “laid."
 | “For the first editors (of Dickinson’s poetry),” wrote Millicent Todd Bingham in Ancestors Brocades, The Literary Debut of Emily Dickinson, “the perennial uncertainty was: which (of Dickinson’s grammatical errors) are mistakes and which are intentional irregularities with a definite function to perform.” I’ll cover some of Dickinson’s errors and irregularities tomorrow; however, in the case of “I died for Beauty,” Bingham’s mother Mabel Loomis Todd seemed to prefer that a correction be made. In 1890, she wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “And do you think it best to leave the ungrammatical use of ‘lain’ instead of ‘laid’ in ‘When one who died for truth was lain’?” |
Higginson wrote back, “I have forwarded yr corrections approved except the ‘lain’ which I think had better stay as it is.”
BTW, as an aside, I tried to find statistical information related to the usage of “lain” over time; however, every frequency chart I came across focused on the verb “lie” instead of its past participle “lain.” I did find this, though: “The past participle ‘lain’ of the verb ‘lie’ (meaning to recline) is not as commonly used as other past participles in modern English. While grammatically correct, many speakers and writers opt for alternative phrasing or the past tense form ‘lay’ instead, particularly in casual speech.”
Back to Dickinson:
In his 1938 book This Was A Poet, Amherst College professor George F. Whicher argued that Dickinson’s grammatical errors – including “lain” for “laid” discussed yesterday – were traceable to the fact that she followed the current spoken usage of her time.
I have not read Whicher’s book; however, I did find this information from a 1938 review of his book in the New York Times:
“Against the accusation that Emily Dickinson wrote slovenly and ungrammatically Professor Whicher rises in wrath. Her poems, he states, have never been carefully edited; often there will be more than one reading, and what would be the better reading has not always been the one printed. Moreover, Emily was brought up in the New England vernacular, which went back to grammatical usage not always that of today.”
In her book Ancestors Brocades, The Literary Debut of Emily Dickinson, Millicent Todd Bingham also spoke of Dickinson’s “grammatical vagaries” and “Emily’s idiosyncrasies” (“such as using ‘of’ for ‘by’: ‘A clover’s simple fame / Remembered of the cow’”).
The review continues:
“Thomas Bailey Aldrich tried to improve certain of her poems, shown him, probably, by Colonel Higginson, but only made them worse. Emily was a law unto herself and a law unto her poetry. Even in her rhymes, which often are no rhymes at all, she must be accepted for what she is, a unique literary being. She has her own special province in the world of poetry; in Professor Whicher's carefully thought-out phrasing, ‘the region of dramatic tension between the mind and experience.’”
BTW, as an aside, I tried to find statistical information related to the usage of “lain” over time; however, every frequency chart I came across focused on the verb “lie” instead of its past participle “lain.” I did find this, though: “The past participle ‘lain’ of the verb ‘lie’ (meaning to recline) is not as commonly used as other past participles in modern English. While grammatically correct, many speakers and writers opt for alternative phrasing or the past tense form ‘lay’ instead, particularly in casual speech.”
Back to Dickinson:
In his 1938 book This Was A Poet, Amherst College professor George F. Whicher argued that Dickinson’s grammatical errors – including “lain” for “laid” discussed yesterday – were traceable to the fact that she followed the current spoken usage of her time.
I have not read Whicher’s book; however, I did find this information from a 1938 review of his book in the New York Times:
“Against the accusation that Emily Dickinson wrote slovenly and ungrammatically Professor Whicher rises in wrath. Her poems, he states, have never been carefully edited; often there will be more than one reading, and what would be the better reading has not always been the one printed. Moreover, Emily was brought up in the New England vernacular, which went back to grammatical usage not always that of today.”
In her book Ancestors Brocades, The Literary Debut of Emily Dickinson, Millicent Todd Bingham also spoke of Dickinson’s “grammatical vagaries” and “Emily’s idiosyncrasies” (“such as using ‘of’ for ‘by’: ‘A clover’s simple fame / Remembered of the cow’”).
The review continues:
“Thomas Bailey Aldrich tried to improve certain of her poems, shown him, probably, by Colonel Higginson, but only made them worse. Emily was a law unto herself and a law unto her poetry. Even in her rhymes, which often are no rhymes at all, she must be accepted for what she is, a unique literary being. She has her own special province in the world of poetry; in Professor Whicher's carefully thought-out phrasing, ‘the region of dramatic tension between the mind and experience.’”
RSS Feed
