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Dickinson's Revision of “Two Butterflies Went Out at Noon”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

William H. Matchett
William H. Matchett*
Affiliation:
University of WashingtonSeattle 5
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Extract

Among the poems Emily Dickinson wrote in her most productive year, 1862, are two which gain particular interest from the fact that she returned to them at a considerably later date. Comparison of the early and late versions offers revealing insights into her development. To her poem about a hummingbird, “Within my Garden rides a Bird / Upon a single Wheel—”, she returned, probably early in 1879, to produce a much better poem on the same subject: “A Route of Evanescence / With a revolving Wheel. …” Condensing twenty lines to eight, she transformed a slack little narrative about the bird, her dog and herself, into a brilliant image of the bird's visual impact. Cutting out the personal pronoun, the dog and the philosophic debate, she managed to convey directly her sense of domestic miracle. The two poems appear separately, as numbers 500 and 1463, in Johnson's three-volume edition of The Poems (1955) and thus are taken over into his recent one-volume edition of The Complete Poems (1960).

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 77 , Issue 4-Part1 , September 1962 , pp. 436 - 441
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1962

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References

1 The dates are as given in Thomas H. Johnson's editions: The Poems of Emily Dickinson, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1955); The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Boston, 1960). Though I quarrel with details of Johnson's editions, I cannot but acknowledge my great indebtedness to them.

2 The relationship between the two poems is discussed by Charles R. Anderson in Emily Dickinson's Poetry: Stairway of Surprise (New York, 1960), pp. 113–117.

3 Mabel Loomis Todd and Millicent Todd Bingham, eds., Bolts of Melody: New Poems of Emily Dickinson (New York, 1945).

4 Repeated in Emily Dickinson: An Interpretive Biography (Cambridge, Mass., 1955), pp. 149–150.

5 The manuscript has “opon”.

6 Though Dickinson's dashes sometimes seem erratic, the dash following “Example” does serve a syntactical purpose, warning that the following conjunction introduces a new, elliptical clause and does not merely link two nouns.

7 See the discussions of “circumference” in Anderson, pp. 55–59, and in Johnson's Interpretive Biography, pp. 140–141.

8 What can be read through the deletion strokes might be “Fa”—a beginning of “Fathoms,” deleted when it was seen to be misplaced.

9 For some discussion of this and other Dickinson manuscript problems, see my review of Johnson's edition of The Complete Poems in MLQ, xxii (March 1961), 91–94.

10 It is possible that Dickinson wrote only “Till Rapture” and left a space for the second half of the line in order to finish it later. The pencil strokes of “Till Rapture” do appear heavier than those of “missed Peninsula.” Even so, “missed” and “Peninsula” remain the probable completion of the line: the angle and width of stroke of each are similar to those of the other, differing not only from those of “Till Rapture” but from those of “Gravitation” and “them” (which are also more like each other than like either of the other pairs).

11 In poem 328, also written around 1862, “Butterflies, off Banks of Noon / Leap, plashless as they swim.”

12 Compare her use of the word in poem 1425 (1877). In a much earlier poem, 76 (1859), “Exultation” is the emotion of the “inland soul” going “past the headlands— / Into deep Eternity—”.

13 As Anderson shows (especially pp. 236 and 279–280), “Noon” is a frequent Dickinson symbol for eternity, which is surely applicable in this poem. As I see it, however, not eternity itself, but recognition of it, here destroys them.

14 My redaction differs from Mrs. Bingham's in each of lines three through eight.