Without Question

Ten of Emily Dickinson’s poems were published in her lifetime, all anonymously.

The Springfield Republican published some of ten, and for one of them, they printed the poem with the title “The Snake.”  The year was 1866, and the poem was “A narrow fellow in the grass.”

Dickinson, though, was not happy with the editing of the poem. She wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson to say that she felt “defeated.”

What made Dickinson feel this way? 

It was the placement of a question mark in the third line of the poem.

“Lest you meet my Snake and suppose I deceive it was robbed of me – defeated too of the third line by punctuation. The third and fourth were one – I told you I did not print – I feared you might think me ostensible.”

​The complete letter is HERE.

She was “defeated” due to “the unconsulted printing of her work and the weighted changes made by editors” (this from an article on Emily Dickinson Museum Museum).

In a 2016 article entitled “Emily Dickinson’s Singular Scrap Poetry” in “The New Yorker,” writer Dan Chiasson explained why:

“Her manuscript had read, ‘You may have met Him—did you not / His notice sudden is—.’ But, when the poem appeared, the editors had supplied a question mark: ‘You may have met him—did you not? / His notice instant is.’

The question mark makes the second half of line three auxiliary to the first: ‘You may have met him—did you not [meet him] ? / His notice instant is.’ But Dickinson’s preferred punctuation, while it leaves the possibility of the auxiliary clause intact, allows for other syntactical relations: ‘You may have met him—[if you haven’t, you should know that] / His notice instant is.’ The words ‘notice’ and ‘not’ reflect each other more vividly without the hard stop of the intervening question mark. Dickinson seems to have preferred ‘instant’ over ‘sudden’ in later drafts of the poem, but when it appeared in the second edition of her work, edited by Todd and Higginson, a comma materialized in the spot where the question mark had gone. ‘I had told you I did not print,’ Dickinson once wrote to Higginson, suggesting that it wasn’t shyness or modesty that kept her from publishing; it was a fierce constancy to her vision of the page.”
 

At the right are portions of her drafts of the poem.

Below are copies of the poem with varied punctuation. The first example is from 1890’s “Poems” edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson.  Concerning the final version – the variant included in a letter to Sue – Cristanne Miller noted in her book “The Letters of Emily Dickinson,” “In this version of ‘A narrow Fellow,’ ED changes punctuation to clarify the syntax that was misinterpreted in the February 17, 1866, SR printing (see L484 to Higginson); here ‘Did you not’ begins a new sentence and line.”