Back on May 13, I wrote about a podcast I’d discovered – well, actually a webpage about a podcast because the page with the actual audio file was missing – and the info on the page centered on a discussion between media host Christopher Lydon and professor and literary critic Helen Vendler. Lydon had interviewed Vendler on her book Dickinson, Selected Poems and Commentaries. The page I’d found included a bit of their exchange on a three-line poem by Dickinson, “In the name of the bee.” My post about it is HERE.
I ended up ordering Vendler’s book before flying off to Chicago for the weekend, and I started reading it on my flight. The first of 150 poems she discusses is “In the name of the bee,” and of this poem, Vendler said this:
“Dickinson’s first editors thought that this short invocation couldn’t be a complete poem. Making one poem out of three poems transcribed by Dickinson on a single page, they tacked this little tercet onto the end of their compound assembly.”
However, Vendler doesn’t mention the other two poems of the “assembly.” What works did first editors Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson combine to create a single poem?
I checked and found the three lines of “In the name of the bee” in the second series of Dickinson’s Poems as the benediction to a poem Todd titled “Summer’s Obsequies.” The other two poems are “The Gentian weaves her fringes” and “A brief, but patient illness.” To be fair to Todd and Higginson, I can understand how and why they interpreted the three creations as one. Take a look at the manuscript, the three appear as one.
I ended up ordering Vendler’s book before flying off to Chicago for the weekend, and I started reading it on my flight. The first of 150 poems she discusses is “In the name of the bee,” and of this poem, Vendler said this:
“Dickinson’s first editors thought that this short invocation couldn’t be a complete poem. Making one poem out of three poems transcribed by Dickinson on a single page, they tacked this little tercet onto the end of their compound assembly.”
However, Vendler doesn’t mention the other two poems of the “assembly.” What works did first editors Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson combine to create a single poem?
I checked and found the three lines of “In the name of the bee” in the second series of Dickinson’s Poems as the benediction to a poem Todd titled “Summer’s Obsequies.” The other two poems are “The Gentian weaves her fringes” and “A brief, but patient illness.” To be fair to Todd and Higginson, I can understand how and why they interpreted the three creations as one. Take a look at the manuscript, the three appear as one.
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Thomas Johnson included the three as one in his 1955 compilation, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, poem #18. However, R. W. Franklin separated the poems in his 1998 edition The Poems of Emily Dickinson, poems numbered 21, 22, and 23. Cristanne Miller noted the following in her 2016 volume, Emily Dickinson’s Poems As She Preserved Them:
“THJ regards the first three poems of F1 (Fascicle 1) as a single poem because they are separated by white space, not a drawn line. RWF prints three poems.”
Miller also presents the three as separate poems.
“THJ regards the first three poems of F1 (Fascicle 1) as a single poem because they are separated by white space, not a drawn line. RWF prints three poems.”
Miller also presents the three as separate poems.
Back to Vendler’s comment about "In the name of the Bee": “Dickinson’s first editors thought that this short invocation couldn’t be a complete poem.” She added, “And in fact such a short poem raises the question of what counts as a poem at all.”
I’ll get into that tomorrow.
I’ll get into that tomorrow.
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