I’ve been discussing a list of Emily Dickinson’s poems found on Wikipedia, specifically the poems which are NOT linked to their full text. Today I’ll discuss “I do not care – why should I care,” “I held it so tight that I lost it,” and “If I should see a single bird.”
First, as you can see from the pic below, all three of these poems are present in the Franklin’s 1998 edition of Dickinson’s poems (the blue arrows are pointing to Franklin’s text’s numbers), but none are in Johnson’s 1955 edition (Johnson numbers would appear in the column to the left).
First, as you can see from the pic below, all three of these poems are present in the Franklin’s 1998 edition of Dickinson’s poems (the blue arrows are pointing to Franklin’s text’s numbers), but none are in Johnson’s 1955 edition (Johnson numbers would appear in the column to the left).
| Johnson did not include these poems in his volume because he classified them as “prose fragments" – and in the case of “If I should see a single bird,” only the first line of that poem has survived. Evidently, “If I should see a single bird” is a poem that Dickinson wrote in 1882 for her nephew Thomas Gilbert (Gib) Dickinson (Gib was 7 years old at the time), but the body of the poem has been lost. |  |
Franklin did include this single line start to the poem in his 1998 volume, but Cristanne Miller did not include it in her 2016 edition of Dickinson’s works. Miller wrote, “I do not include ‘If I should see a single bird,’ which Franklin numbers as poem 1591; Martha Dickinson Bianchi (Dickinson’s niece) reported that a poem beginning with this line was sent to her brother Gilbert, but no transcript or manuscript survives. A report of a first line is not, in my view, a poem.”
However, in the “notes” section of Miller’s book, she added this, “On the other hand, it would be important to include this poem if one is counting the number of poems Dickinson is known to have written or to have circulated.”
However, in the “notes” section of Miller’s book, she added this, “On the other hand, it would be important to include this poem if one is counting the number of poems Dickinson is known to have written or to have circulated.”
In the case of “I do not care – why should I care,” the poem does not appear in Johnson, but it is included in Franklin and Miller; however, Miller’s version of the poem includes an additional line. Here’s Miller’s note about that poem: “(Franklin regarded) the final line as probably prose and does not include it, although it provides an end rhyme (‘perdition’ / ‘constitution’).”
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