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Not My Cup of Tea

5/8/2026

Today’s post follows up on some unfinished business from a recent post on Dickinson’s use of the word “tea” in her poems. When I checked the archive for “tea,” twelve entries popped up representing five different poems; however, one of the five does not include the word “tea.” Instead, the search picked up the word “tea” in the corresponding notes for the poem, “Not all die early, dying young,” but the lines themself are tea-less.

The odd thing was that the publication notes for the poem made no sense; here’s the statement:

“LH (1951)” refers to the book Emily Dickinson's Letters to Dr. and Mrs. Josiah Gilbert Holland, a volume of letters edited by Theodora Van Wagenen Ward and published in 1951. But what the heck does “The tea in” mean?

Here’s a funny bit: I was sitting in a library the morning I discovered this perplexing statement, so I asked a librarian there if “The tea” were some sort of publication jargon with which I was unfamiliar, but she was just as confused as I was – so I emailed the folks at Harvard Library, and just yesterday, I heard back:

“Thanks, as always, for reporting errors in EDA! It appears that a substantial amount of text was dropped for the Publication History. I’ve noted this in my list of future corrections. I can’t figure out exactly where the text was cut to create “tea”, so this is only a guess. The correct text should read:

PUBLICATION: Letters (1894), 177, from the Holland copy (B), as though part of a letter; also LL (1924), 261; and Letters (1931), 171. LH (1951), 72, from Letters (1931). Poems (1955), 716-17 (A summarized, B summarized, C principal); CP (1960), 461 (C). MB (1981), 1072 (C), in facsimile. (J990)”

Sooo…as you can see, the info includes all of the publication specifics (albeit in abbreviated form), and there’s really nothing to do with “tea” at all.

By the way, the post about Dickinson’s poems which include “tea” is HERE.

On a whim, I thought, “Okay, I’ve checked coffee and tea, so what about juice?” No surprise. Dickinson never used the word “juice” in any of her poems. I then checked “water.” Well, “water” generated sixty-two entries on the archive – and the way the “new and improved” archive works, it will take me some time to figure out exactly how many different poems this represents. For now, let me leave you with this beautiful poem, and ask, “By what are you taught?”

By the way – I just love that final line. Magnificent.

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A Clean Sweep

5/7/2026

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SPOILER ALERT: I swope off on a bit of a tangent down below, but hey -- the info I shared is as vital as it is nugatory!

Yesterday’s post included this bit of info from George Monteiro’s book Robert Frost and the New England Renaissance about Frost’s poem “Blue-Butterfly Day”:

"It is altogether fitting, therefore, that Frost, his mind on midwinter, sees his butterflies flurrying down like snowflakes to ‘freshly sliced’ graves in the April mud. For Frost, fragility sems to equate butterflies with snowflakes. Even in ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snow Evening,’ Frost echoes this theme when, playing on Dickinson’s phrase, ‘easy sweeps of sky,’ he writes of ‘the sweep / Of easy wind and downy flake.’”

Also in yesterday's post I noted that Dickinson’s phrase “easy sweeps of sky” is line 8 of “My Cocoon tightens – Colors tease,” one of Dickinson’s butterfly-themed poems I’d written about earlier in the week.

Below left: Robert Frost's "sweep of easy wind and downy flake" in "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." Below right: Emily Dickinson's "easy Sweeps of Sky" from "My cocoon tightens -- Colors tease."

Finally, I closed yesterday's post with, “Tomorrow I’ll take a closer look at sweeping in Dickinson’s poetry" -- so let's get sweeping!

I ran several searches on the Dickinson Archive:

“Sweep” generated 19 entries representing 7 poems, 6 of which include the word “sweep.”

“Sweeps” brought up 15 results representing 5 poems, 3 of which include the word “sweeps” (vs. “sweep”).

“Swept” yielded 20 entries representing 8 poems, all of which include the word “swept.”

“Sweeping” produced 8 entries representing 3 poems 2 of them include the word “sweeping”; one of them has “sweeping” as an alternate word choice for the word “trailing.”

Additionally, from the Dickinson Lexicon, I looked up the ways in which Dickinson used the words “sweep,” “sweeps,” “swept,” and “sweeping” in her poetry:

That very first statement is certainly chock-full of options to pick from, no? Are there any surprises there for you?

Before getting into Dickinson's poems, I thought I'd take a look at that "OE form of swope" in the OED and report on some of what I found..

The first entry for "swope" (below on the left) was, indeed, related to "sweep." On the right is a usage from the 1200s, and it seems to have something to do with "swoping" to get rid of pet odors! LOL!

The next entry connected "swope" to "soap," and on the right is one example of usage from the 1400s describing "waisching with oyl and swope." However, most of the OED usage examples showed the word as "sape," "saep," "saip" or "sope." The first example with "soap" was from 1687 -- and it's sounds like whoever was making the trades really wanted (and probably needed) soap! LOL.

The next definition of "swope" was related to making a "swap." -- but take a look at that usage from the 1300s on the right -- looks like someone made a questionable swap! LOL. Next, take a gander at that example from 1577 (NSFW?). Hmm...I wonder was being swapped there in the darke.

Yet another entry for "swope" showed it as a variant of "swoop" -- and check out that use from 1698 -- those must have been some ferocious hawks!

The final entry for "swope" relates the word to drinking, and it mentions "a sup" -- but, interestingly, not "a sip." Also, none of the usage examples show the variant, "swope." However, take a look at that example from the mid-1500s which uses "sope" and discusses a smoky ale. Did you catch from volume's name from which the statement was taken? LOL. Now that's the kind of knowledge we can all use!

I did encounter a few other surprises with the Lexicon's definitions for Dickinson's use of "sweep," but I'll get to those tomorrow. For now, let's take a look at her use of "sweeping," a term found in two poems, “A single Clover Plank” and “The bustle in a house.” One other poem, “Like Men and Women Shadows walk,” showed up in my search of the archive; however, the word “sweeping” was not used in the poem; instead, it was written on the page as a possible alternate choice for “trailing” in line 4.

In “The Bustle in a House,” “sweeping” is used in a typical fashion – associated with cleaning – but metaphorically speaking in dealing with grief following a death.

In “A single Clover Plank,” the wind – described as “The Billows of Circumference” – was “sweeping” a bee away. Fortunately, a bit of clover idly swaying in the gust saved the bee, who escaped the “harrowing event” without as much as uttering an “Alas.”

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The Butterfly Effect

5/6/2026

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Some recent posts centered on butterfly poems by Dickinson and Frost. One post focused on Frost’s first poem ever published, “My Butterfly,” and another discussed butterfly poems by Dickinson which likely influenced the young poet. In George Monteiro’s book Robert Frost and the New England Renaissance, author Monteiro wrote, “Frost tried his hand at still other ‘butterfly’ poems. ‘Blue-Butterfly Day’ concisely recounts the life of a butterfly.”

Monteiro continued, “The poet’s tone is wistful; these creatures are not nature’s poets (how Dickinson referred to birds), though they come close: they ‘all but sing’ as their actions presage their own deaths. It is altogether fitting, therefore, that Frost, his mind on midwinter, sees his butterflies flurrying down like snowflakes to ‘freshly sliced’ graves in the April mud. For Frost, fragility sems to equate butterflies with snowflakes. Even in ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snow Evening,’ Frost echoes this theme when, playing on Dickinson’s phrase, ‘easy sweeps of sky,’ he writes of ‘the sweep / Of easy wind and downy flake.’”

Dickinson’s phrase “easy sweeps of sky,” by the way, is from line 8 of “My Cocoon tightens – Colors tease,” the very poem I discussed on Sunday, HERE, concerning the word “clew” vs. “clue” in line 12; on Monday, HERE, concerning another use of the word “clue” (all about a “cold case” for a missing person in the 1870s); and yesterday, HERE, focusing on a poem by Edward Mayes inspired by line 3 from the poem, “A dim capacity for Wings.”

Tomorrow I’ll take a closer look at sweeping in Dickinson’s poetry.

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I'll Fly Away

5/5/2026

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The other day I shared Dickinson’s “My cocoon tightens – Colors tease,” a poem about a seemingly awkward transformation with discomfort and even teasing and embarrassment in the opening line and line 4, leading later to flight. The speaker foresees a brighter future, though – sensing “A dim capacity for Wings” – and it is that line the sets the stage for my post today. I discovered a work by poet Edward Mayes entitled “A Dim Capacity for Wings.”

Below: Dickinson's "My cocoon tightens – Colors tease."

Below: Edward Mayes' poem, "A Dim Capacity for Wings"

I must admit, though, that I’m more than somewhat confused by the poem, and I’m hoping maybe someone can help. What is this poem about? I’m not really sure.

First, in lines 1 thru 5, there is water imagery. Has someone fallen overboard from a boat (see lines 2/3) or has there been a flash flood (see line 5)? Is someone drowning – literally or figuratively – and is their life flashing before their eyes? In Dickinson’s poem, line 2 states, “I’m feeling for the air,” which certainly works with the “possible drowning” idea – but Dickinson’s poem centers on transformation in the sense of things to come. Mayes’ poem conveys more a sense of what has been. “Que fue” vs. “Que sera.”

Concerning Mayes’ poem:

Lines 6, 7 & 8: If ones’ life is “flashing before their eyes,” have they remembered odd bits of trivia they knew – and no one cared?

Lines 9 & 10: Is this a reference to monotonous work in office cubicles? Lines 10 & 11 – more trivia?

Line 12: Is this a humorous reference to aging via footwear?

Line 13: Is this a reference to “adulting” responsibilities (in the way of yard work)? And then with line 14, is this some reference to having seen something that held meaning to the person – say, artifacts in a museum (like the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame)?

Lines 15 & 16: Is this a meaningful realization about “steering” one’s own life?

Lines 17 thru 20 – More “realizations” later in life (though I’m not sure what all of them might mean).

Line 21 thru 24: Are these images hints of a recent mid-life crisis?

Lines 24 & 25: Is this a reference to how things have changed, and possibly some regrets?

Line 28 into line 29: More regrets; lines 29 to 30: More realizations; line 30 to 31: More mid-life crisis; and finally line 32: Acceptance – it is what it is?

I noticed almost immediately that the poem is written as one sentence – 32 lines in 8 stanzas – and the fast-paced, single stream-of-consciousness statement works with the “life flashing before one’s eyes” idea. However, what threw me was the opening clause, “We’re not sure you caught that….’ Who is the “We”? And I’m assuming the “you” used throughout the poem is not ME – but the entity in the poem addressed by the “We.”

Shown at the right: Mayes' poem with the pronouns highlighted. Who is speaking -- the "We" of the poem?

However, this perspective – the “We” and the “you” they are addressing – does not seem to work with my take on “drowning” – whether drowning literally or drowning figuratively. Unless – and this notion (based on the final stanza of Dickinson's poem) seems to be quite a stretch – the “you” in the poem “baffles at the Hint” of the “clue divine” provided by the "We," and thereby perceives “a dim capacity for wings”?

I’m so confused. Am I missing something here? Am I way off base?

What does Mayes’ poem suggest to you?

Help me! I’m drowning!

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Cold Case

5/4/2026

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My original plan for yesterday’s post (HERE) centered on Robert Frost’s poem “Blue Butterfly Day,” but I got side-tracked by Emily Dickinson’s poem “My Cocoon tightens – Colors tease,” a work which Mabel Loomis Todd entitled “From the Chrysalis” when she published it in the first posthumous edition of Dickinson’s poetry. What veered me off track was Todd’s use of “clew” in the last line of the poem instead of “clue.” “Clue” – as Dickinson clearly wrote – appears in all other editions of her poetry.

I wondered if Dickinson ever used the word “clew” in any poem, but no. I ran a search on the Dickinson archive, and there was just the one poem – “My Cocoon tightens – Colors tease” – due to its use of "clew" in Todd’s volume. I then checked on Dickinson’s use of the word “clue,” and again, just one poem popped up – the same as listed for “clew.” However, the word “clue” did show up for one other poem, “Death's Waylaying not the sharpest” – but “clue” is NOT used in the poem itself. No, the word "clue" appeared in the “Manuscript” notes on the archive page – and wait till you hear about this intriguing “clue.”

Turns out that in January 1874, Joseph Sweetser, husband to Catherine Dickinson Sweetser – Emily Dickinson’s “Aunt Katie” – walked out of his New York City apartment – and disappeared! That’s right – he never made it back home. Newspapers carried the story, but – as far as I can tell – Sweetser never made it home nor was his body ever found. Sounds like fodder for an episode of "Dateline"! Better yet – isn’t there a show called “Cold Case”?

In the following month, Dickinson sent the poem to her aunt in a letter that said, “Saying nothing, My Aunt Katie, sometimes says The Most.” Here’s the poem:

I searched online for information related to the disappearance of Joseph Sweetser, but I didn’t find much. Here’s what I know:

The Incident: Joseph A. Sweetser, a resident of New York City, vanished on January 21, 1874.

Last Seen: He allegedly walked out of his apartment, and despite widespread media coverage, no clues regarding his whereabouts or ultimate fate were ever found.

Condition: Reports suggest that shortly before his disappearance, he had suffered a concussion (possibly on January 17) and was attempting to walk to church at the time he went missing.

Unsolved: The case remained completely unsolved, and he was never heard from again.

I understand that info about Sweetser’s disappearance was reported in the January 29, 1874, issue of the "Springfield Republican," but I have been unable to find that. However, I did find evidence of a report in the "Boston Globe" on January 26, 1874 – see below. I could not gain access to the page, though, without a paid subscription – so this is all I got! LOL.

To this date, the disappearance of Joseph A. Sweetser remains a cold case from the 1870s.

For info on other crimes and mysteries in Amherst in the 1800s, click HERE.

UPDATE: A reader who saw this post has a subscription to the at Newspapers.com, and forwarded to me the complete article:

Also, the “Round Table” mentioned in the article is NOT the Algonquin Round Table, the celebrated group of NYC writers, critics, and actors—nicknamed "The Vicious Circle"—who met daily for lunch at the Algonquin Hotel from 1919 to 1929.
I looked up Round Table info for the 1870s and found this:

A group known as the Round Table existed in Boston during the 1870s. It was a social reform discussion group that was active in the city, with members often including figures involved in social reform and Unitarian circles, such as Fanny Baker Ames.

Key Details regarding Boston “Round Tables” in the 19th Century:

The 1870s Group: It was a gathering of reform-minded individuals focused on discussion.
Context: This was a separate entity from the later famous “Algonquin Round Table” in New York City (1920s) or the British “Round Table movement” (1909).
Related Initiatives: While not the same group, similar intellectual gatherings of the era included the Saturday Club (1850s–1870s), and later, the New England Round Table of Children’s Librarians was founded in 1906.
Attempts at Organizations: In 1886, a similar, distinct effort to form a “Boston authors club” was attempted by figures like Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Dean Howells, and Thomas Bailey Aldrich, which did not fully materialize at that time, according to the Boston Authors Club.

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I Haven't Got a Clew

5/3/2026

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Let’s start the morning with a spelling test. Well, actually, a reading test.

Let’s pretend that you are Mabel Loomis Todd, and you are preparing poems by Emily Dickinson for publication. You’ve come across a poem on a loose sheet of paper, and it includes these words. What are they?

If any of the words were difficult to decipher, maybe this will help. To read the words in context, take a look at the paper with the complete poem.

Okay, here are the answers. How’d you do?

By the way, I included word #8, “clue,” to make a particular point which I’ll get to in a minute; first, though, I’d like to give credit where credit is due – and that is to Mabel Loomis Todd! Can you imagine sifting through 1700-plus poems in Dickinson’s handwriting and attempting to make sense of them all?

This poem, by the way, is “My Cocoon tightens – Colors tease,” a work which Todd entitled “From the Chrysalis” and published in the first posthumous edition of Dickinson’s poetry. Here’s the poem as it appears in the various editions of Dickinson’s poetry.

At the bottom of her manuscript, Dickinson includes two alternate word choices, "degrades" for "demeans" in line 4, and "Implies" for "concedes" in line 7. Above, you can see which edition landed on which of the words. However, I'm a bit perplexed as to why Todd used "clew" instead of "clue" -- the word in Dickinson's handwriting in very obviously "clue."

Here’s what the Dickinson Lexicon has for “clue” – and it does not include a separate entry for “clew”:

Here’s info from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary for "clew":

"The 'ball of thread' meaning of clew (from Middle English clewe and ultimately from Old English cliewen) has been with us since before the 12th century. In Greek mythology, Ariadne gave a ball of thread to Theseus so that he could use it to find his way out of her father's labyrinth. This, and similar tales, gave rise to the use of clew for anything that could guide a person through a difficult place. This use led, in turn, to the meaning "a piece of evidence that leads one toward the solution of a problem." Today, the variant spelling clue, which appeared in the 17th century, is the more common spelling for the "evidence" sense, but you'll find clew in some famous works of literature. Also, clew is the only choice for the sailing senses."

Why do you think Todd went with "clew" instead of "clue"?

Oh, and before I close, let's take a look at "tease" -- or "teaze" -- in the opening line of the poem. You'll note that Todd and Johnson spelled it as "tease," and Franklin and Miller opted for "teaze." Here's the word as it appears in the handwritten manuscript. What say you?

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How Public -- Like A Frog

5/2/2026

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A few weeks ago, Malaria Trump stood in front of the press and gave her best impression of Sergeant Schultz (from the TV show "Hogan's Heroes") speaking about the Democratic hoax known as the Epstein Files:

"I know nothing!
I see nothing!
I hear nothing!"

Well, that cleared things up, no?

In response to Malaria's pathetic prevarication, I have posted Emmett Lee Dickinson's poem "I'm NOT in the files! Are you?" below on the left. Dickinson's poem inspired his third cousin to pen her poem, "I'm Nobody! Who are you?" below on the right.

By Emmett Lee Dickinson:

I’m NOT in the files! Are you?
Are you – in the Files – too?
Then there’s photos of us?
Don’t tell! They’d banish us – you know!

Oh deary – to be – in the Files!
How public – like that Prince –
Don’t speak my name – the livelong Term –
To the gottdamn Press!

By Emily Dickinson:

I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you - Nobody - too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they'd banish us - you know!

How dreary - to be - Somebody!
How public - like a Frog -
To tell your name - the livelong June -
To an admiring Bog!

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Tea for Two

5/2/2026

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Recently I wrote about Dickinson’s use of “coffee” in one of her poems and “tea” in a handful of others. One poem with “tea” which I did not share is below, “The grave my little cottage is.” Those of you with a fondness for the macabre will enjoy it! The speaker of the poem is dead and buried, residing in her “little cottage” (i.e., her grave), “keeping house,” and laying out “the marble tea” for a loved one she is expecting – soon – when they reunite for “everlasting life” in the society of those who passed before them.

The Amherst College Library Digital Collection’s page states this about the work's transcription (shown below):

“The transcription is part of the collection of transcriptions of Dickinson's poems produced by Mabel Loomis Todd for publication in a volume edited by her. Most transcriptions are in Todd's own hand; some are typed, and some were transcribed by other individuals. Editor's marks, alternate wording, and notations are written on the transcript. This transcription is part of the Printer's Copy for Poems: Third Series.”

On the bottom of the Amherst College Library's page (HERE), my little eye spied the logo for the IIIF, an entity I wrote about just yesterday (HERE):

You know I had to click on that!

Well, turns out the link below the logo in not a link on which to click. Instead, I had to copy and paste it into my browser, and I got this, HERE . It’s either metadata associated with the image of the transcript or with the entire page? One can also download the metadata – but the choices were all Greek to me!

Finally, I found this 1972 article in the New York Times, “Emily Dickinson still lives in Amherst." It describes Dickinson’s “little cottage” in Amherst’s West Cemetery where she is currently “keeping house" and serving tea -- and more! The complete article is included below the pic:

EMILY DICKINSON STILL LIVES IN AMHERST

By Nardi Reeder Campion
June 11, 1972

AMHERST, Mass.—One poem by Emily Dickinson, that gentle lyricist of death begins, “After a hundred years/Nobody knows the Place.” It is not quite true. After 86 years, the people of Amherst know the place where she is buried.

Somebody, probably more than one somebody, places flowers before her headstone, fresh daffodils in a careful bouquet, violets bunched childishly, backyard sunflower in a kitchen jar. Emily would be pleased. She lavished time and love on her garden and conservatory and once remarked, “Flowers are so enticing I fear they are sins—like gambling or apostasy.”

The woman Mark Van Doren called “much the best of women poets [who] comes near the crown of all poetry” lies in West Cemetery on Triangle Street in a plot enclosed by a newly‐painted wrought‐iron fence near the middle of the graveyard. There she is buried with her overpowering father, Edward Dickinson, his dutiful wife, Emily Norcross Dickinson, and their other unmarried daughter, Lavinia. But Emily's beloved brother Austin lies elsewhere, which at first seems odd because the five Dickinsons were seldom parted in life. As Emily wrote to Austin during his brief stay in Boston: “We're all unlike most everyone, and therefore more dependent on each other for delight.”

Austin Is buried with his wife Susan and their three children in his own plot, in Wildwood Cemetery, at the north end of town.

Like Coming to Tea

At West Cemetery a white porcelain knob opens the black gate marked EDWARD DICKINSON 1858, and a marble step leads to the family enclosure. To enter is a bit like dropping in for tea, something easier to do in death than in life with the aloof Dickinsons. Emily thought of it first:

The grave my little cottage is, Where “Keeping house” for thee I make my parlor orderly And lay the marble tea.

West Cemetery was important to Emily Dickinson. “I have often walked there sweet summer evenings,” she wrote, “and read the names on the stones, and wondered who would come and give me the same memorial.” Her own rectangular headstone, beneath the leafy canopy of a green ash, bears the inscription: EMILY DICKINSON BORN DEC. 10, 1830 CALLED BACK MAY 15, 1886. Prof. Richard Sewall of Yale, who has studied this most mysterious and elusive of women for 20 years, says the only things he is absolutely sure of are those two dates.

The phrase “called back” might be puzzling to those who recall that Emily had shocked intensely religious Amherst by refusing to join the church. “Some keep the Sabbath going to Church,” she wrote. “I keep it, staying at Home/With a Bobolink for a Chorister/and an Orchard/for a Dome.” And she described her Trinity this way: “In the name of the Bee/And of the Butterfly/And of the Breeze—Amen!” But Jay Leyda's impressive piece of scholarship, “The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson,” reveals that “Called Back” was an English novel Emily had liked. As she was dying she wrote her Norcross cousins in Cambridge; all she said was:

“Little Cousins, Called back. Emily.”

Death was the great subject for Emily Dickinson. As a girl she Wrote to a friend: “The other day I tried to think how 1 should look with my eyes shut, and a little white gown on, and a snowdrop on my breast; and I fancied I heard the neighbors stealing in so softly to look down in my face—so fast asleep —so still—Oh, Jennie, will you and I really become like this?”

Far removed from mere morbidity, Emily's relentless probing of the meaning of death produced some of her greatest poems, such as “Because Could Not Stop for Death” and “Safe in Their Alabaster Chambers.” It was her pervasive awareness of death that made life almost unbearably precious to her. “I find ecstasy in living,” she said. “The mere sense of living is joy enough.” These two sides of the Dickinson coin may account for the increasing interest in her today, especially among the young who share her absorption in awareness and death and her conviction that “Forever is composed of Nows.”

Amherst is in love with its most fa mous citizen. When the United States Postal Service issued an Emily Dickinson stamp, second in the American Poetry Series, the town staged a three‐day celebration. Putting aside its panic over real estate developers, snarled traffic and the student vote, this bustling city of colleges (town population: 13,000; student population: 21,035) feted Emily in lectures, seminars, music and readings, films, special exhibitions and guided tours. It was a splendid festival to honor the shy little woman who was a town legend during her lifetime and became a renowned poet only after death.

The Dickinsons have always been important here. Emily's grandfather was founder of Amherst College. Her father was the treasurer of the college and United States Representative. Her brother Austin succeeded their father as college treasurer and was for many years that New England phenomenon, the Town Moderator. But it was Emily, always dressed in white and writing secretly within the seclusion of her father's house, who has brought worldwide attention to Main Street, Amherst.

One can't help wondering what the author of “I'm Nobody” would think of having her picture on 130 million postage stamps. She called Fame (capitalization with Emily is both unpredictable and meaningful) “the one that does not stay,” and with good reason, for she saw only seven of her poems published. Today all of her 1,775 poems have been translated into 19 languages, and Buckingham's “Dickinson Bibliography” records 2,600 books, plays, dance dramas, articles, records and films that have been written about her.

Fortunes Change

Amherst's inscrutable poet in her “white seclusion” provokes overheated curiosity. Did she have one lover, or many lovers, or none? Did she seek fame or shun it? Was she crippled by a father fixation? Was she an agnostic, a manic‐depressive, a lesbian? Was she actually unbalanced? The questions about her are as numerous as the books about her. Last September The New York Times Book Review carried an article on the two most recent Emily “exposés” under the wry headline “Emily Dickinson as a Maternally Deprived Plagiarist.”

“All men say ‘what?’ to me,” she wrote. Today we would ask ‘why?’ Why, for the last half of her life, did she withdraw from the world? There are countless theories, but no clear answers. At Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke College she was shy but friendly; then gradually she retired from society and by the time she was 40 she was talking to friends through doors partially closed. When piano concerts were played for her, she listened hidden in the shadows of the hall. When she needed a new dress, the seamstress had to fit it to her sister. When she was sick, the doctor was expected to make his diagnosis as she walked past the door. It is all very puzzling and intriguing, but as she said in one of her poems, “The Riddle we can guess/We speedily despise.”

The magnet for the Emily buffs who make the pilgrimage to Amherst is the Dickinson mansion at 280 Main Street. Few places in the history of literature are as clearly associated with the creative act of writing as the brick house with the cupola on it that was built in 1813 by Emily's grandfather.

Emily was born there in 1830 and died there 55 years later, and it was behind the hemlock hedges that she found the “polar privacy” she needed to explore her inner experience. Perhaps the miracle of Emily's “magic prison” (her phrase, which Prof. David Porter of the University of Massachusetts says is typical of the poet's “linguistic stealth”) was that she did not need actual experiences. With her acute sensitivity she could Imagine all—love, death, immortality:

I never saw a Moor—I never saw the Sea—Yet know I how the Heather looks And what a Billow be.

I never spoke with God Nor visited in Heaven—Yet certain am I of the spot As if the Checks were given--

The guest book at Emily's house one day recently was signed by visitors from Japan, North Dakota, Norway and “Concord in spirit.” The house is owned by Amherst College, and Jean M. Mudge, who lives in it with her professor husband and children (including a daughter who is afraid of Emily's ghost), says that although 3,000 people have come there nothing has ever been taken and nobody smokes. Visitors are quiet, almost reverential. Clearly this is something special to them.

In the double living room are twin marble fireplaces decorated with marble grapes. It is easy to picture Emily and her family in the room: the strongwilled, pious father “coming out from the sanctity of his Sunday nap"; the gentle, self‐effacing mother always exclaiming, “Don't worry your father!"; the talented brother who, after Harvard Law School, never wished to spend even a vacation away from Amherst, and the “soft‐lipped, white‐skinned” sister whose low‐cut dresses distressed her father. (“Lavinia,” he'd snap, “put on a shawl.”) Emily's father died in this house when she was 44 and her mother died there eight years later. Two years after Edward Dickinson's death, Emily wrote her cousins: “I dream about father every night, always a different dream, and forget what I am doing daytimes, wondering where he is.” Emily and Lavinia lived out their years here alone, except for their Irish maid, Maggie Maher. Austin kept close watch over them from The Evergreens, the house

And how does one visualize Emily? In “Emily Dickinson, Friend and Neighbor,” MacGregor Jenkins, the minister's son who lived across the street, says, “In that house dwelt a Rare Presence a joyous person, slight of stature, quick and graceful, warm and impulsive, who had a perplexing habit of precipitous flight.” Emily was not shy with the neighborhood children but once, when giving them gingerbread in the kitchen, she remarked, “You know, dears, if the butcher boy should come now I would Jump into the flour barrel.”

Unfortunately, there are only three pictures of Emily Dickinson in existence: an oil portrait with Austin and Lavinia, done when they were children, which is in the Houghton Library at Harvard; a small silhouette, made when Emily was 14, and a daguerreotype of her at age 17, during the one year she attended Mount Holyoke College. The last two are so valuable they are locked in a vault in the Robert Frost Library at Amherst College and brought out only for big occasions such as the Emily Dickinson Stamp Festival. The daguerreotype is the picture that is always reproduced; a variation of it appears on the postage stamp. Emily's “self portrait,” written for her mentor, T. W. Higginson of The Atlantic Monthly, is equally famous: “I am small, like the wren, and my hair is bold, like the chestnut burr—and my eyes, like the sherry in the that the leaves.”

Higginson's pen portrait of his “partially cracked poetess” is not so kind. Emily was 40 when they first met in the Dickinson living room. Later he wrote his wife: “A step like a pattering child's and in glided a little plain woman with two smooth bands of reddish hair and a face... with no good feature —in a very plain & exquisitely clean white pique & a blue net worsted shawl. She came to me with two daylilies which she put in a sort of childlike way into my hand & said ‘These are my introduction’ in a soft frightened breathless childlike voice — & added under her breath ‘Forgive me if I am frightened; I never see grangers & hardly know what I say.” Higginson recorded her stream‐of‐consciousness chatter and then added: “I never was with anyone who drained my nerve power so much. Without touching her, she drew from me. I am glad not to live near her.”

It is Emily's bedroom that most excites the true Dickinson disciple. It was, literally, her world where “the Soul selects its own Society/Then—shuts the door.” There she wrote and polished her poems and stored them away, and it was there that Lavinia discovered them, neatly tied in packets, after her death.

Austin's daughter, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, remembered her Aunt Emily's room filled with the fragrance of the hyacinths that crowded all four window sills. “That west window of hers!” she wrote. “The stage box overlooking our personal dramal... no sleigh ‐ride counted unless Aunt Emily would look out as I coasted by... later I took my favorite beaus to stroll beneath her window where she examined them through swiftly drawn blinds.”

Letters Preserved

Although Emily was out of the world, she was still of it. She lived through her letters to friends and relatives. Luckily for us, hundreds of those letters have been preserved with their perceptive, witty comments on the world around her. From her four windows she “saw New Englandly,” describing the funeral across the street, the light on the Holyoke range (“my Alps”), the circus parading into town or Mrs. Sweetset “rolling out in crape to intimidate antichrist; at least It would have that effect on me.”

In the Amherst of today Emily is everywhere. The Community Chest banners quote her (“Hope is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul”), stores display her pictures and sell “The Emily Dickinson Year Book,” and the town library boasts an entire room devoted to Dickinson books and memorabilia. Gone are the days when a resident could say of her poems, “Believe me, boys, they're a bunch of broken bottles.” Or a Dickinson relative could remark, “Don't know why Emily made such fuss over daisies. To me they look like hard‐boiled eggs cut in two.”

Fame is indeed fickle. When Ralph Waldo Emerson visited Amherst, he stayed with the Austin Dlckinsons. In a December, 1857, Amherst paper tickets for Emerson's lecture were reduced from 25 cents to eight for $1. The editor added, “Few people can afford not to hear Ralph Waldo Emerson, when they can hear him for 121/2 cents.” There is no record that Emily either heard him speak or went next door to meet him, but it is fun to imagine what a furor the two of them would generate in this town today.

At the Dickinson stamp celebration it was Archibald MacLeish who put Emily precisely in her place: “The truth is that Emily Dickinson was that rarest of God's creatures, a great poet—creatures so rare that only a little company can be mustered from the whole of time.”

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Magnum Opus

5/1/2026

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Did Emily Dickinson ever use the word “interoperability” (in-tuhr-op-uh-ruh-BIL-uh-tee) in any of her poems?

LOL – of course not. I don’t even have to check the online archive for that one. But here’s the skinny on why I asked such a ludicrous question.

I was checking the archive the other day – I believe I was checking on poems with the word “coffee” (there’s one) – and over on the right of the page, I saw this:

I’d not noticed this before (BTW: The archive was “updated” about a month or so ago – and this was added).

I clicked on where it says, “Copy Manifest Link.” I pasted it on a Word doc and got this:

https://nrs.harvard.edu/URN-3:HUL.EDA:W2678:MANIFEST:3

Ooookay.

So I clicked on that and got this (and below is just a portion of it):

Ooookay. Soooo…what is it I’m supposed to do with all that?

Next, back on the archive site, I clicked on “What is IIIF?” (HERE) -- and it turns out that the IIIF is the International Image Interoperability Framework.

Ooookay.

I scanned much of the site – and by the way, “IIIF” is pronounced “triple-eye-eff,” – but all the info is beyond me. LOL. I’m not sure how, on the Dickinson archive, that this is a “tool” for me. I’m pretty confident that I won’t be using whatever the IIIF has to offer.

So back to “Interoperability”. Isn’t that a fancy-schmancy word?

The term was first coined in the mid-1960s for use in the military regarding the ability of two or more pieces of equipment to operate in conjunction. Its etymology: “Formed within English, by derivation: interoperable adj.: see ‑bility suffix.”
In the 1970s the word was picked up by the computer industry concerning “the ability of two or more computer systems or pieces of software to exchange and subsequently make use of data.” Here’s an example of usage from an article from 1992: “For years, interoperability was an unrealized dream, and so-called compatible hardware and software packages frequently weren't.”

Of course, I opened today with a silly question – did Dickinson ever use the word “interoperability”? However, I went to the archive to see if she ever used any form of “operate,” and that’s when I saw the word “opera” embedded within the word “interoperability.” At first, I figured I’d make some sort of a joke with “opera” – but the joke’s on me!

Turns out that “opera,” derived from Latin “opus,” “to work,” is related to “operate” is related to “interoperability.” Who knew! LOL.

More info on the IIIF is HERE; and get this: down at the bottom of the page, it says, “SEE ALSO DjVu (HERE) – described as “a computer file format designed primarily to store scanned documents, especially those containing a combination of text, line drawings, indexed color images, and photographs.” I just thought the name, DjVu, was very clever!

By the way, a search for “opera” on the Dickinson archive results in eight entries representing three poems: “A feather from the whippowill” (sic), “I cannot dance upon my toes,” and “I think I was enchanted.” I wrote about these poems back in March of this year, HERE, and back in 2024, too, HERE.

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I Did It My Way. Well, Her Way.

4/30/2026

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A literary-themed Reels popped up on my Insta feed the other day. The account posed this question: “How would famous writers rewrite this sentence in their style?” The sentence? “A bunny was looking for a carrot.”

I swiped through the slides, of course, and I suspect you know for whom I was looking. Yep – Emily Dickinson, and surprise, surprise – she was there. However, I wasn’t particularly dazzled with the Dickinson version:

A Hop – within – the Clover
A Longing – for the – Gold
The Root – beneath – the Boulder
A Story – yet – untold

What do you think?

The Reels -- with "rewrites" by other authors like Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Kurt Vonnegut and more -- is HERE.

What did I like? The brevity, the rhythmic pattern, the Dickinsonian capitalization, and the dashes.

What was underwhelming? The overuse– or misuse? – of the dashes (I’m not sure Dickinson would have split so many words with the dashes, and I suspect there would have been one or two at the line breaks); the oversimplified, child-like nature of the lines; the missed opportunity for a slant rhyme.

I thought I’d give it a go, and here’s what I came up with:

As Hemispheres exchange the joining of the day
A keen eye – unabated – pursues the Reward –
And once restored – returns – with leporine speed
To proceed unnoticed – in the daily record –

What do I like about this effort? It’s more complex, and (at least to me) sounds more plausibly Dickinson-esque; the use of the dash is more true to Dickinson’s style; plus, I employed non-standard capitalization – but I didn’t overdo it. I did not mention a carrot, nor did I use “rabbit,” “bunny,” or “hare”; instead, I used “leporine” in line 3 to indicate that I’m talking about a rabbit – thereby implying a carrot as the “Reward” in line 2 (or, I suppose, if not a carrot, something a rabbit would “pursue”). I also played on two common themes of Dickinson’s: the subtle passage of time – in this case from night to day (i.e., the two “Hemispheres” which join the day) and the indifference and disregard of humans to the daily incredible phenomena of nature (in this case, the sunrise and the rabbit). At the end I used a slant rhyme – “Reward” and “record” – and I also used business-like terminology (“the daily record”) to emphasize the monotony of daily life.

What needs improvement? The rhythmic pattern – the twelve-syllable lines (with eleven in line 3) is a bit unusual for Dickinson. I should have strived for 8 - 6 - 8 - 6 (I think I could probably re-work this and come up with two four-line stanzas with fewer poetic feet per line). Also, should I have used the term "rabbit" instead of the obscure "leporine"? I checked the Dickinson lexicon, and she never used "rabbit," "hare," or "bunny," so I thought I'd stick with that practice. Of course, she never used "leporine" either; however, Dickinson possessed a great deal of scientific knowledge, and she would frequently use academic or specialized words which fit the topic.

So what do you think of my version? Should I stick with it, tweak it a bit, or just go back to the drawing board?

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