The Birds and the Bees -- and the Flowers

In preparing for the publication of the second series of poems by Emily Dickinson, editors Mabel Loomis Todd (in Massachusetts) and Thomas Wentworth Higginson (in New Hampshire) wrote letters back and forth to discuss which poems to include.  Interestingly, both sent letters to one another dated July 18, 1891, and both asked about the same poem, “The Flower must not blame the Bee.”

Todd said to Higginson:  “If ‘The flower must not blame the bee’ seems too enigmatical, let us leave it out….” 

Higginson wrote to Todd:  “I demur about ‘The flower must not blame the bee,’ for though the first verse is exquisite, yet the footman from Vevay is so perplexing.” 
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So…did the poem make it into the second series or not?

Nope, Todd and Higginson did not include it.  As a matter of fact, they did not print it in the 1896 third series either. 

Turns out, Todd and Higginson never published the poem.  Instead, the poem first appeared in the 1935 edition of Poems of Emily Dickinson edited by Dickinson’s niece Martha Dickinson Bianchi and her co-editor Alfred Leete Hampson  (and just FYI, following the death of Martha Dickinson Bianchi in 1943, Hampson and his wife, Mary Landis Hampson, inherited the Evergreens, the home of Bianchi’s parents, Austin and Susan Dickinson).
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While I was exploring this poem, I came across these lines from Kahlil Gibran’s “On Pleasure.”

In life, Gibran recommends, “be in your pleasures like the flowers and the bees.”  And to all you Flowers  out there – be sure to forgo the need for a footman!  LOL.