Take the Plunge!

I’ve been writing about Robert Frost’s first published poem, “My Butterfly,” and in the initial post on 4/20, HERE, I info shared info from George Monteiro’s Robert Frost and the New England Renaissance, including this:  “What finally enabled Frost to complete his poem, however, was his reading of Emily Dickinson’s butterfly poems.”  Although Monteiro named various butterfly poems by Dickinson, he asserted, “Two poems particularly show forth as antecedents for Frost’s poem,” both from the second series of Dickinson’s Poems published in 1891.  The two?  “From cocoon forth a butterfly” and “Two butterflies went out at noon.”

Below is the first, with how Frost would have encountered it in the second series of Poems in 1891 on the left.​

The second poem provides an interesting case to review for a work to have inspired Frost, for at some point (but no date provided), the poet said this of Dickinson:

“She was more interested in getting the poem down and writing a new one…I feel that she left some to be revised later, and she never revised them…She has all kinds of off rhymes. Some that do not rhyme. Her meter does not always go together…I try to make good sentences fit the meter.  That is important…Though I admit that Emily Dickinson, for one, didn’t do this always. When she started a poem, it was ‘Here I come!’ and she came plunging through. The meter and rhyme often had to take care of itself.”

Of course, in 1891, Frost would have encountered this version of the poem:

However, this is certainly not a poem by Dickinson that reflects a "Here I come" let's-plunge-through-this mindset as one version of the poem dates from 1863 and another from 1878; additionally, take a look at the alternative word and line choices considered by Dickinson. Does this reflect the work on one who would disregard revisions?

I think what Frost interpreted as Dickinson’s “Here I come…let’s plunge through this” approach was actually – in many cases – more of  a “I know what I want” approach – and if/when Dickinson was not satisfied, she would mull things over – even for years if need be. Still, there were those lines written in flashes of inspiration – and to make sure she’d not miss a single one, she made it a daily habit to carry pencils and scraps of paper in her apron pocket – a practiced immortalized in a short poem by Monteiro:

Interestingly, Frost himself said this about his first poem, “La Noche Triste” (HERE):

“"The lines came into my head walking home from school. I remember the time so clearly. I recall how there was a wind and darkness. I had never written a poem before, and as I walked, it appeared like a revelation, and I became so taken by it that I was late to my grandmother's." 

The very next day, Frost took his poem to the editor of his school's newspaper, who accepted it immediately. "La Noche Triste" was published in the Lawrence (Mass.) High School Bulletin in April 1890.

I suspect Frost experienced other ideas and lines through epiphanies and moments of revelation, but more often his works do seem to have been forged through a more arduous, meticulous process. Perhaps Dickinson was less methodical – but certainly no less thoughtful.  I suppose she was more like Mozart (who’d compose in haste with remarkably few revisions or corrections ) and perhaps Frost was more like Beethoven (who’d work for months of years to create works with messy manuscripts filled with scratch-outs and revisions).

If Frost misunderstood Dickinson’s method, though, he did at least admit that in her poetry, “rhyme always gave way to truth” – and this constant force made him “feel her strength.”