I’ve been writing about Emily Dickinson’s handwriting, and yesterday I picked two poems at random – “Garlands for Queens may be” from 1858 and “Apparently with no surprise” from 1884 – and I posted pics with Dickinson’s handwriting for each.
While I was exploring all of this, I came across an article which included some discussion about “Garlands for Queens may be.” The article, by Gabrielle Dean, is entitled ”’The Last Rose of Summer’: How Emily Dickinson Read and Rewrote the Favorite Song of the Nineteenth Century,” and it appears on what was the Emily Dickinson Archive from 1994 - 2012.
While I was exploring all of this, I came across an article which included some discussion about “Garlands for Queens may be.” The article, by Gabrielle Dean, is entitled ”’The Last Rose of Summer’: How Emily Dickinson Read and Rewrote the Favorite Song of the Nineteenth Century,” and it appears on what was the Emily Dickinson Archive from 1994 - 2012.
| The article is lengthy, and the author describes his main purpose as this: “My premise here is that Dickinson’s sheet music served as a fundamental training ground for her developing sensibilities as a reader and writer of poetry. Specifically, I track the traces in Dickinson’s writing of one piece of music in her volume, an instrumental version of Thomas Moore’s song, ‘Tis the Last Rose of Summer.’” The complete article is HERE -- and if you run a word-search for the word “Garlands,” you’ll find the discussion of the poem about half-way down the page. |  |
Concerning the poem, Dean states that it is “tempting…to read this as a declaration of connection between women” but adds that “it might be that ‘chivalry’ pushes the poem over the line into something more orthodoxly heterosexual. In both readings, the rose blurs the line between the romantic and the platonic.”
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