So Be It

I’ve been writing about three lines by Dickinson which appear as a stand-alone poem in Franklin’s edition of the poet’s “complete poems”; however, they show as the final three lines of a 19-line poem in the Johnson edition of her “complete poems”; the lines are as follows:

In the name of the Bee -
And of the Butterfly -
And of the Breeze - Amen!

I came upon these lines when I was exploring Dickinson’s poems about bees, but today I thought I’d examine something completely different:  how many of her poems use the word “Amen.” 

What do you think?  Care to take a guess?

I have to admit – when I looked into this, I was a bit surprised by the result because I expected a higher number.

So how many times did Dickinson use the word “amen” in her poetry?  Just this once, in the lines cited at the start of the post – so in the Franklin edition of her poems, it appears in the stand alone poem “In the name of the bee.”  In the Johnson edition, it appears in the final line of the 19-line poem “The Gentian weaves her fringes.”

BUT – there’s more to this story – and I might need the help of any linguistic experts out there in CoSo land:  the Dickinson archive showed one other poem when I researched the word “amen.”

BUT – there’s more to this story – and I might need the help of any linguistic experts out there in CoSo land:  the Dickinson archive showed one other poem when I researched the word “amen.”

According to the archive, “amen” also appears in “The Way to know the Bobolink,” but when I took a look at that poem, it doesn’t use the word “amen.”  Instead, line 10 of that poem states, “Amenable to Law”  – and “amenable” includes within it the word “amen.”

Hmm…the archive linked a poem with the word “amenable” to my search for “amen”; however, it did NOT link poems which use other words like “amend,” “firmament,” “sacrament,” “stamen”, “testament” and others – all of which include the word “amen.”

Sooo – is the word “amenable” related to the word “amen”?  

I’ll tell you what I found out tomorrow.

One last thing, though, about the three lines with which I started this post:  all three of the stand-alone poems from the Franklin edition which comprise the single, 19-line poem in Johnson were first published in the 1891 “Second Series” of poems by Dickinson as a single poem, and editor/publisher Mabel Loomis Todd gave it the title, “Summer Obsequies.”

When read together as a single poem as a memorial service to the passing of summer, the lines certainly reveal how clever and amusing Dickinson was.

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CONTINUED...

I ran a search on the Dickinson Archive yesterday to see how many poems of hers include the word “Amen” – and the answer is just one:  “In the name of the Bee,” a three-line poem in Franklin’s edition of her “complete poems” or “The Gentian weaves her fringes,” a 19-line poem (which includes the three-line poem from Franklin) in the Johnson edition of her “complete poems.”

However, the archive also showed another poem with “amen,” The Way to know the Bobolink”; however, it turns out that that poem includes the word “amenable,” not “amen.”

Are “amen” and “amenable” related?

Regarding the etymology for “amen,” Google states, “Old English, from ecclesiastical Latin, from Greek amēn, from Hebrew 'āmēn ‘truth, certainty’, used adverbially as expression of agreement, and adopted in the Septuagint as a solemn expression of belief or affirmation.”

For “amenable,” a Google search popped up this:  “late 16th century (in the sense ‘liable to answer to a law or tribunal’): an Anglo-Norman French legal term, from Old French amener ‘bring to’ from a- (from Latin ad ) ‘to’ + mener ‘bring’ (from late Latin minare ‘drive animals’, from Latin minari ‘threaten’).”

(I grinned a bit when I read that “drive animals” bit.)

I found this very similar info from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary:  “borrowed from Anglo-French, from amener ‘to bring, bring to a court (as witnesses, pledges), summon, take, lead’ (also continental Old French) (from a- —going back to Latin ad- ad-— + mener ‘to lead, bring’) + able -able — more at demean entry 2.”

Finally, from a vocabulary-building site, I found this:  “And although ‘amenable’ is unrelated to ‘amen,’ you might take advantage of their similarity anyway, thinking of the amenable person as the one who, when asked if they'll go along with some plan, always says ‘Amen, sister!’ or ‘Amen, brother!’”

But – take a look at this – from the online Dickinson Lexicon re: “amenable”:

AngFr < amener, to bring forth < L. mināre, threaten, lead cattle with shouts.

1. Answerable; liable; accountable; responsible; submissive; subject to in obedience; [word play on amen, inter.] faithful; religiously true; able to say “amen.”

Love that “lead cattle with shouts.”  LOL.