Winging It

In yesterday’s post, I mentioned that I’d completed some yard work this past Saturday, and at one point as I was gathering fallen branches in the woods behind my house, I came upon some butterfly wings among the dead leaves. 
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"How weird is that," I thought to myself, because earlier that morning I was working on a post for today which includes this statement about a very famous poet's first poem: 

"Lawrence Thompson traces (THE POEM) to (THE POET'S) stay at Dartmouth College in 1892.  The poem was inspired, writes Thompson, ‘by a moment which had occurred late in the fall of his few months at Dartmouth, a moment when he had found a fragile butterfly wing lying among dead leaves.’”  

I said that today I’d fill in the deets (i.e.,  the title of the poem and the name of the poet) – and voila!  Today has arrived, and here’s the skinny on this – the low down, the scoop – or, since today is 4/20, should I say, the straight dope? (#iykyk)

I’ve been reading portions of George Monteiro’s book Robert Frost and the New England Renaissance, specifically chapters 2 and 3 about Emily Dickinson’s influence on the early works of Frost. Monteiro shared that in March 1894, Frost “had submitted his first poem to the Independent. ‘My Butterfly,’ an elegy, was accepted for publication almost by return mail, though it would not appear until the issue for November 8, 1894.”

Yes, this is the poet and poem alluded to in my engaging but engimatic remark in yesterday’s post. On page 13 of Monteiro’s book, he states, "Lawrence Thompson traces ‘MY BUTTERFLY’ to FROST's stay at Dartmouth College in 1892.  The poem was inspired, writes Thompson, ‘by a moment which had occurred late in the fall of his few months at Dartmouth, a moment when he had found a fragile butterfly wing lying among dead leaves.’”  Monteiro goes on to say, “The aspiring poet was not immediately able to transform his memory into poetry, ‘Because the delicate wing seemed to him so perfect an image, representing the brevity of life,” continues Thompson, ‘he had been trying to build an elegy around it ever since he had left Dartmouth College.’ What finally enabled Frost to complete his poem, however, was his reading of Emily Dickinson’s butterfly poems.”  Monteiro named various butterfly poems by Dickinson, but then submitted, “Two poems particularly show forth as antecedents for Frost’s poem.”  I’ll get to them tomorrow (or soon).

For now, let’s take a look at Frost’s poem – and Monteiro was correctamundo when he proclaimed, “It begins somewhat archaically” – a sentiment echoed in a Library of Congress blog post by  Peter Armenti who said this:  “Readers of Frost’s better-known poetry will find “My Butterfly’ – laden with traditional poetic elements and archaisms such as thine, thee, and ’twas – uncharacteristic of the poetry Frost would eventually come to write.”

And just FYI:  A funny thing happened on the way to this forum:  Every version of the poem I found online was slightly different – and I don’t mean different as the result of a comma substituted for an em dash or an exclamation point for a period.  No, different versions had, in various stanzas, different words, phrases, complete lines – and/or distinct phrases or lines were missing – and this is why I’m late in publishing today’s post. I waited until I got home from work to check my copy of The Poetry of Robert Frost – The Collected Poems – Complete and Unabridged (published in 1979 and edited by Edward Connery Lathem).  I wanted to see how the poem was presented in an authoritative book on Frost. Therefore, the version below on the left is as the poem appeared in the Independent; and on the right, as it appears in the edition of The Poetry of Robert Frost.

Did Frost ever revise the poem?  Is the Independent version as Frost wrote it, or did the editors make changes a la Todd and HIgginson with Dickinson’s poetry?  At this point, I don’t know for sure about what they did or did not change – I’ll see what I can find out.  For now, this is what I have.

I will say, I thought it was unusual that Frost began with “Thine” and stuck with the archaic uses of “thee” and “thine” (other versions even include “thy”) – and then at the end of the poem in the Independent, there’s a shift to “you” and “your.”  Was that Frost?  Or the work of a careless editor?  

Well, take a look – at both the 1894 and 1979 versions – and then I’ll continue with more on this tomorrow.