Lie Detector

NOTE:  I began my  discussion on "She laid her docile crescent down" HERE, and the conversation continues below:

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In July 1891, Mabel Loomis Todd decided not to publish Dickinson’s poem “She laid her docile crescent down” in the second volume of Dickinson’s poems.  She wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “I do not understand it, and although it is beautiful, I omitted it because there were already so many more for Vol. II than had appeared in Vol. I.”

​It is a beautiful but somber poem – about a tombstone marking the grave of a now forgotten (or at least unidentified) individual.  Note the variations shown below in line 2 – which do you prefer – the “mechanic” stone, the “subjunctive” stone,” or the “confiding” stone? ​

I can understand Todd’s confusion with that opening line, “She laid her docile crescent down.”  Who is “she,” and what was it, exactly, that she laid down?  

A quick reminder:

TO LAY: lay (present), laid (past), laid (past participle), and laying (present participle) all mean “to place or put down”; 

TO LIE:  lie (present), lay (past), lain (past participle), and lying (present participle) mean “to recline.”

Sooo… since the poem is about the tombstone with its etched emblem of a crescent, “she” could not have done the “laying,” for she is ‘lying” – in the grave! It had to have been others who “laid" the stone with the “docile crescent” upon the speaker’s final resting place.
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To be honest, this poem called to mind a time when my wife and I visited Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, VA (named for the holly trees there, not Tinsel Town in California). The cemetery was designed by John Notman, one of the foremost architects in Philadelphia and New Jersey during the first half of the nineteenth century, known for his Gothic and Italianate designs of churches, cemeteries, and estates.

On this day, I happened upon a tombstone for Mary Elizabeth Frayser (1869 - 1968).  I’d never heard of Ms. Frayser before, and her stolid stone with its epitaph, beyond the dates, caught my eye: 

PIONEER LEADER AMONG
TEACHERS, SOCIAL WORKERS
AND ORGANZERS OF
​RURAL LIBRARIES IN 
THE SOUTH​

That certainly piqued my interest. I looked her up when I got home, and you can read my post about her HERE.

Finally, one last thing about Dickinson’s poem:  She sent a copy of it to a friend, Ms. Holland, and she  pasted newspaper clippings to the paper – one of a star and crescent and one of a leaning tombstone.

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For more information about Hollywood Cemetery, which serves as the final resting place for many historic figures including Presidents James Monroe and John Tyler, click HERE. 

More info on the architect, John Notman, is HERE. 

Also, I found this site, HERE, with information as to the meanings of tombstone etchings.  According to this site, a crescent is an “Emblem of the Virgin Mary.”