Notes on the Text

1. In Unpublished Poems (1935), Martha Dickinson Bianchi and Alfred Leete Hampson place both occurances of the word still in quotation marks.  The manuscript and Johnson's versions both show the first, but not the second, enclosed in quotes.  Back.
   
   
2. Bianchi and Hampson edit this to "themselves."  Although this is perhaps more grammatically correct, it does not connote the antagonists' lack of individuality in the way that the manuscript's "themself" does.  Back.
   
   
3. In the manuscript, Dickinson breaks the line after "lodged" and places "a Bird" on its own line. None of the printed versions of this poem list this as a separate line. Although doing this would visually mimic the captivity of the bird, I also feel this is one line. The most compelling reason behind this decision lies in the capitalization pattern of the manuscript. While all of the other lines in the manuscript begin with an initial capital letter, "a Bird" begins with an obviously lowercase letter. Also, the length of the line in the manuscript leads me to believe that Dickinson could have run out of room. The word "lodged," which precedes the line break, is at the edge of the paper.  Back.
   
   
4. Dickinson offers "Look down upon Captivity-" and "Abolish his-Captivity-".   A "note" at the bottom of the manuscript reads "+ Abolish his-".  Johnson's readers edition includes only the variant and does not include the "dash" between "his" and "Captivity."  Back.
   
   
5. "No more have I" is rendered as "nor more have I" in the Bianchi-Hampson version of 1935.  Back.
   
   
6. The Bianchi-Hampson version translates the closing punctuation marks for the final two stanzas as exclamation points.  In the manuscript, the sole exclamation point follows the first word of the second stanza, "Still."  Although these punctuation marks are clearly not exclamation points, they are also not clearly anything in particular.   Back.

Notes on the Process

Although my interpretation of Dickinson's poem tries to stay true to her manuscripts, a hypertext performance obviously strays from the confines of ink and paper.  In attempting to allow both variants to co-exist in the poem, I felt including them both in the text was important.  Following cues from the manuscript, the "+" allows readers to open up the poem. Some might feel these are two different poems (they technically exist on two different "pages"), I feel they are not only one poem, but leaving one of the variants out limits the poem.  The method I have used works mainly because there is only one set of variants in the poem. Perhaps for a poem that has more than one instance, a pull-down menu could let the reader choose which words she or he wanted in the text. Unfortunately, this seems to be very intrusive to the text. Perhaps, as HTML and other web technologies progress, there will be a more "natural" way to integrate the possibilities of variation into the text. Or, perhaps there already are ways with which I am not familiar.

Another element of the manuscript I tried to translate into hypertext was size.  Dickinson's poems do look small when typed in a twelve point font on an 8x11 1/2" piece of paper, but the manuscripts overflow with her words.  Even what I have attempted in making the text's font larger than "usual" creates more white space on the page than I would have liked.  Perhaps changing the size of the browser from full screen to a more appropriate size would be one way to counteract the white space.

Christopher McCarthy
cmccarth@wam.umd.edu