For decades after her death, the public and critical perception of Dickinson was tied to an image of her as a reclusive poet, unwilling to publish her poems conventionally after seeing the editorial alterations made to a few by the Springfield Republican. However, late twentieth-century scholars have proven that Dickinson circulated her manuscripts in a number of venues, including letters and hand-made books or fascicles. Smith, Werner, and others have argued conclusively that these "holographic performances" were constructed purposefully for circulation and against the typographical limitations of the nineteenth-century. By providing photographic reproductions of many of these works, R.W. Franklin's The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson has permitted scholars to speculate on how the very characteristics that a century of editors have dismissed or reconfigured - her unconventional capitalization, punctuation and word variants - are necessary components to understanding Dickinson's work. Moreover, her holographic style may also be representative of Dickinson's artistic philosophy. As Smith suggests, "Dickinson's 'publications' reveal her regard for language as a dynamic exchange between speaker/author and listener/audience and for poetry as an art fashioned in those processes" (Rowing 73).
With these perspectives in mind, any editing project should be recognized as a collaboration between the author and the editor, one that foregrounds the editorial intention of convenient and accessible dissemination while not dismissing a responsibility to (but ultimate inaccessibility of) the author's intentions. For Dickinson in particular, an editor should recognize her collaborative artistic philosophy and attempt to infringe upon it as little as possible. What my project attempts to demonstrate is how Dickinson's project can be represented in typology by editing one poem, "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain" (P 280 of Thomas Johnson's edition of The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson). While a typological translation of her words can never capture the complex variations of her handwriting, it can offer an accessible venue from which a reader can examine and interact with the poem's multifarious meanings while still appreciating the importance of Dickinson's unconventional grammar.
One way to understand the influential aspects of the poem's punctuation, line breaks and capitalization is to analyze its typological publication history, and to speculate how editorial translations of Dickinson's handwritten text may have altered or limited its meaning. Although not all the published versions are represented here, the most influential versions are available, specifically those which have shifted a public understanding of the poem. Thus, my editing philosophy takes its cue from Peter Shillingsburg, who states, "the editor's job may ... [be] to prepare a text and record the historical development of the authorial forms of the work so the reader can study the whole work - a clear text and the authorial variant forms. Only with this material can a reader arrive at an informal judgment about what the author's work of art is" (37-8). We must also recognize that even though only one manuscript version of "I felt a Funeral" is extant (in fascicle 16) or documented in the notes of Dickinson's editors, it is possible that other versions may have been lost. A discussion of the poem's publication history follows, and while it is listed here in chronological order, after viewing this version of the poem, the reader can chose to view other typological versions of "I felt a Funeral" or proceed to the analysis of the poem's representation in these other editions. An analysis of this editing collaboration (hereafter called "hypertext 1998 version") and a bibliography also follow.
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And when they all were seated,
And then I heard them
As all the Heavens were
And then a Plank in
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading - treading - till
it seemed
That Sense was breaking through -
A Service, like a Drum -
Kept beating - beating - till
I thought
My Mind was going numb -
lift a Box
And creak across my [Brain crossed out]
Soul
With those same Boots of
Lead, again,
Then Space - began to Toll,
a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence some
strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here -
Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and
down -
And hit a World, at every
+plunge,
And +Finished knowing - then -
+Crash - +Got through -
The first printed version in The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Third Series (1896). (See the 1914 edition of the Third Series.)
I felt a funeral in my brain,
And mourners, to and fro,
Kept treading, treading, till it seemed
That sense was breaking through.
And when they all were seated,
A service like a drum
Kept beating, beating, till I thought
My mind was going numb.
And then I heard them lift a box,
And creak across my soul
With those same boots of lead, again.
Then space began to toll
As all the heavens were a bell,
And Being but an ear,
And I and silence some strange race,
Wrecked, solitary, here.
The history of this poem and its first translation into print must begin with a discussion of how the body of Dickinson's work was edited initially. Much of this information can be found in Smith's upcoming essay, "Editing Emily Dickinson's Manuscripts," the first chapter of Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson, and Franklin's The Editing of Emily Dickinson: A Reconsideration. Also see the bibliography.
After Dickinson's death in 1886, the discovery of her "scriptures," as Smith calls the vast collection of "handwritten copies of poems, letters, and letter-poems," prompted an immediate reaction by her relatives to restrict or mediate access to her work ("Editing" 1). Correspondence was destroyed, fascicles were dismantled, and a number of articles, particularly letters, were altered and partially erased. The identity of the actors is not always determinable, and their motivations are only partially known. Regardless of who or why the alterations were made, however, the results remain the same; a part of Dickinson's work and details about her life will never be known and what is known may be untrue or distorted. For example, the order of the fascicles, including fascicle 16, remains speculative as they were reconstructed years later in 1950 by Harvard University.
The decision to print Dickinson's poems was made by her sister, Lavinia Dickinson. Ironically, Emily Dickinson's primary correspondent and literary advisor, her brother Austin's wife, Susan Dickinson, had little to do with the editorial process which produced the first three series of poems (for reasons not entirely known), while Mabel Loomis Todd, Austin Dickinson's mistress, played a crucial role. Todd and Thomas Higginson, another friend and adviser of Dickinson's, co-edited the first two editions while Todd edited the third alone. As "I felt a Funeral" appeared in the The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Third Series, published first in 1896, the details of the construction of this volume will be examined more closely.
Franklin describes the dismantling of Dickinson's fascicles and sets in The Editing of Emily Dickinson, although he does not conclude who the responsible parties were. He does note that the manuscripts probably were still intact in 1891 when Todd sorted and edited the poems, recopying and cataloging them as she went (33). "I felt a Funeral" was found in one of the hand-bound, handwritten packets Dickinson compiled, which Todd numbered set 16. For the three series, however, Todd and Higginson paid no attention to either the compilation or order of the poems in these fascicles. The editorial policy that they used for the first two series altered significantly for the third, in large part because Todd was now the sole editor, since Higginson's ill health prevented his collaboration. Franklin provides a detailed discussion of the Third Series publication, but Caroline C. Maun's essay "Editorial Policy in The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Third Series" goes further to document in detail how the modifications increased. Like the previous editions, Todd regularized Dickinson's poems, in order to reduce the number of capitalized words, dashes, and commas, standardize the line breaks, and increase rhyme schemes. Yet only six poems were shortened in the first two series while by the Third Series, twenty-one poems had stanzas deleted (Maun 59; 57). Scholars are able to confirm the deletions as Todd's work since, unlike the first two series, the printer's copy is extant and clearly indicates which stanzas were cut. What is less clear is why.
"In my mother's defense I should repeat that she did these things to protect Emily. The dose must not be too strong. Even after the smoothing-off process the waywardness of the poems was still offensive to many readers" (Ancestor's Brocades, 337). The fact that Millicent Todd Bingham wrote these words indicates that by 1945, Todd's editorial style demanded explanation. Although Franklin argues that Todd merely "extended" the editorial policy of the earlier editions, Maun is more accurate when she concludes that Todd's "unstated policy of withholding the author's stanzas for purposes of conventionalization . . . so exceeded the earlier editorial practices that it constitutes an new approach to the poems" (Editing 83; 71). Bingham's defensiveness seems to concur. Without its last stanza, "I felt a Funeral" is less about a psychic breakdown, precipitated by unidentified physical or emotional pain, than a mediated discourse on death. Since the speaker's fragmentation occurs mainly in the last stanza, all implications that the speaker has lost consciousness or rationality and descended into death or madness have been lost. As Maun suggests, "[w]ithout the last stanza this poem is significantly less frightening, less introspective, and less 'offensive'" (65). What Maun does not consider is that Todd fit Dickinson's poems into categories - "Life," "Love," "Nature," and "Time and Eternity" - and thus the altered version is more readily amenable to a predetermined interpretation, situated within the last category and surrounded by poems unequivocally about death (such as "Bereaved of all I went abroad," "From us she wandered now a year," and "A sickness of this world it most occasions"). Moreover, Todd's changes in punctuation and capitalization shifts the emphasis away from words or phrases that are significant to the poem's meaning. In an interesting contradiction, Todd removed the dashes or changed them to commas or periods but added dashes not found in manuscript in the line "As all the heaves were a bell, --." Further discussion of the importance of the punctuation, capitalization and stanzaic changes can be found in the analysis of the hypertext 1998 version.
I felt a funeral in my brain,
And mourners, to and fro,
Kept treading, treading, till it seemed
That sense was breaking through.
And when they all were seated,
A service like a drum
Kept beating, beating, till I thought
My mind was going numb.
And then I heard them lift a box,
And creak across my soul
With those same boots of lead, again.
Then space began to toll
As all the heavens were a bell,
And being but an ear,
And I and silence some strange race,
Wrecked, solitary, here.
And then a plank in reason broke
And I dropped down and down
And hit a world at every plunge--
And finished knowing then.
Millicent Todd Bingham, in offering a rationale for her mother's editorial policy in Ancestor's Brocades, provides only one example of stanza deletion, yet, as the earlier quotation indicates, she clearly recognizes the culpability of her mother's actions. In "Poems of Emily Dickinson: Hitherto Published Only in Part," an article for The New England Quarterly, however, Bingham places a different emphasis on the reason why so many incomplete poems were printed in the three series editions. Even though she acknowledges that many readers might wonder if the rationale was "to pass judgment on Emily's work," she concedes with the verbal equivalent of a slight nod and then turns around to argue that the editors were more likely confused about which version to use, because Dickinson "dash[ed] off more and more . . . giving less and less time to re-writing of earlier drafts," so many were left "unfinished" (3-4). When she focuses specifically on the Third Series, she again points to her mother's active role in editing but elides liability by reminding the reader that "Emily herself may have authorized the omissions, having left" many versions of the same poems (17). Bingham's depiction of Dickinson is somewhat biased and inaccurate, to state it mildly. Maun asserts that more than half of the altered poems of the Third Series were modified by Todd without any comparable evidence that the decision was anyone's but hers (61). Bingham does include commentary on the poems where variations with and without the stanza are extant, but she provides no additional statements for poems like "I felt a Funeral." It is likely that Todd was, Smith's words, trying to "establish the identities of particular poems and to make authoritative . . . printed translations of Emily Dickinson's holographs"("Editing" 3).
Significantly, Bingham does not acknowledge her own editorial praxis beyond restoring the missing stanzas. In "I felt a Funeral," she apparently continues the Todd-Higginson policy of regularizing line breaks, capitalization and punctuation, and thus, like her mother, compromises the important contributions these make to Dickinson's meaning, discussed in conjunction with the analysis of the hypertext 1998 version. While Bingham drops the mysteriously added dashes after "bell," she does make other alterations to her mother's version, specifically, un-capitalizing "Being" and changing "plunge," to "plunge--", another odd addition since the manuscript has a comma. Thus, the poem's psychic fragmentation has returned only to have another meaning compromised or diminished; without the capitalization, "Being" now becomes a verb rather than a noun, so that rather than a "Being" or consciousness becoming reduced to the overwhelming sensation of sound (as "an Ear"), the only way to give the phrase meaning is to ignore the "And" in the next line and use "I" as the subject of the verb "to be," as in "I being but an ear."
The printed version in The Poems of Emily Dickinson, 3 volumes, (1955), ed. Thomas Johnson.
280
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro,
Kept treading - treading - till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through -
And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum -
Kept beating - beating - till I thought
My Mind was going numb -
And then I heard them lift a Box,
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again.
Then Space - began to toll,
As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race,
Wrecked, solitary, here -
And then a Plank in Reason, broke
And I dropped down, and down -
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing - then -
19. plunge] Crash - 20. Finished] Got through -
Thomas Johnson's The Complete Poems, produced in conjunction with a three-volume set of The Complete Letters of Emily Dickinson and a one volume Reader's Edition of The Complete Poems, is undeniably an invaluable and praiseworthy achievement. Yet, with the benefit of hindsight about the changing conceptions of both literary criticism in general and Dickinson scholarship in particular, scholars now see how Johnson's editorial choices do direct readings of Dickinson's work. His rationale was specific for a historical time and place, as Smith points out, and thus he had a New Critical bias toward elevating the poem as "the primary, most significant source of meaning" ("Editing" 15). The poems are ordered not as they are in Dickinson's packets but chronologically, numbered and separated from each other in inclusive units.
Although a convenient locating device that scholars continue to rely on, the number "280" does, in effect, do what Dickinson most certainly did not; title the poem, meaning that "I felt a Funeral" is often referred to by Johnson's number as if that is the poem's title. Granted, he did try to "restore" Dickinson's meaning by recapitalizing words and adding dashes based upon his interpretation of the handwritten manuscripts. His work was intended to be a printed translation of the manuscripts and is often seen as such. One of the many examples of his influence can be found in the Dickinson entry of The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, vol. 2 (1995), which claims that "only in 1955 did the body of work appear as Dickinson wrote it" (1042; emphasis added). Yet even a cursory glance at the manuscript for "I felt a Funeral" proves this statement false, because Johnson made three significant alterations beyond separating the poem from fascicle 16, all which are restored to the hypertext 1998 version. He regularized the line breaks, maintaining the hymnal stanza forms started by Todd and Higginson, and noted the variants not with "+"'s, but with line numbers at the bottom of the poem. He similarly pointed to the crossed out "Brain" only in an adjoining note. This first alteration conventionalizes the poem's form and also compromises the meaning in that certain words are no longer standing alone, an effect that gives them additional weight. His configuration of the variant word choices also indicates, as Smith says, that Johnson's Dickinson "had not decided how to complete a poem" instead of perhaps "decidedly refusing closure" ("Editing" 17). Johnson, in other words, could not conceive of an artist who saw her work as a collaboration between author and reader. The importance of keeping the crossed out "Brain" within the body of the poem will be discussed in the analysis of the hypertext 1998 version. Finally, Johnson undermines Dickinson's innovative and meaningful artistry by calling the dashes a "musical device" and the capitalization "capricious" (Complete Poems, Reader's Edition x-xi).
Ralph Franklin also revolutionized the field of Dickinson studies when he published a photographic reproduction of Dickinson's holographs. This allowed scholars, myself included, who are unable to journey to Amherst or Cambridge where the manuscripts are held to examine Dickinson's handwritten work. In addition, Franklin restores the poems to their packets by ordering the poems by fascicle or set. However, The Manuscript Books are still editions of the poems and letters and as such must be understood as one person's representation of Dickinson's work. Halftone photographic images, for instance, do not reproduce the texture of the paper, differentiate between pen and pencil marks, or depict erasures and other less noticeable marks. Moreover, Franklin problematizes the open interpretative possibilities that this project suggests by imposing his view of Dickinson's motives for constructing the packets in the introduction to the book and in other articles. A more detailed discussion of Franklin's conclusions about the manuscripts is found in Smith's "Editing Emily Dickinson's Manuscripts" and in other works in the bibliography. For this project, it is sufficient to recognize that The Manuscript Books fit into a discussion of Dickinson's typological history even if her poems are not published in typography, because they are still edited publications of her work.
My typological version of "I felt a Funeral" attempts to reconcile the elisions and alterations of previous versions, while foregrounding the act of editing with a self-consciousness the earlier editors deny. Hence, I have offered a general discussion of what editing implies (a collaboration between author and editor) before asserting my views on why reconstructing Dickinson's punctuation, capitalization and line breaks is essential to the meaning of the poem. What should also be clarified is the exciting opportunity that hypermedia offers late twentieth-century scholars. For example, this site has been constructed so that readers can view the printed versions of the poem in any order they chose, as well as see the poems outside the confinements of the page. The Electronic form offers unlimited scholarly and educational possibilities and allows us not only to examine the multiple variations of Dickinson's work but also to recover her project as a artist. The Dickinson Editing Collective was established to explore these possibilities and a discussion of their project can be found at the Emily Dickinson Electronic Archives.
My version of "I felt a Funeral" reconfigures, first of all, Dickinson's lineation in the manuscript version. As Jay Ladin noted in his article, "Breaking the Line: Emily Dickinson and William Carlos Williams," the line breaks function as "a heightening of concentration, a redirection of attention from larger units . . .to smaller units, phrases, [or] words . . ." (42). For example, in the first two stanzas, the separation of "it seemed" and "I thought" onto their own lines emphasizes the subjectivity of the speaker's experience. The line breaks here also draw the reader's eye to the repetition of "Kept treading" and "Kept beating." The violent downward motion of the action is heightened by the lineation in last stanza. The dashes function comparably to separate and highlight particular phrases and, like the breaks, force the reader to pause and confront the meaning of the word or phrase before proceeding. The dash between "Space" and "began to Toll" functions this way. The dashes at the end of lines also work to question the finality of the line in a way that a period cannot. Ladin sees the dashes as performing another crucial component of Dickinson's collaborative philosophy, since they ask "readers to substitute mentally appropriate punctuation," without having to chose a particular one consistently (44). Thus, unlike Todd and Higginson's period or comma, the reader can decide whether to close the phrase or merely pause.
Reinserting the "+"s with the variant words similarly offers readers a choice without stipulating either which to choose or even that a particular option must be chosen. Visually, the placement of a "+" in the text alerts the reader that the choice exists, rather than, like Johnson, acknowledging the variation outside the boundaries of the poem as an aside. Finally, the inclusion of a crossed out word, "Brain," is more than just an faithful rendering of the handwritten work. Rather than assume, as Johnson does, that some poems are more finalized than others, I would rather allow the reader to conjecture whether the word has a function in the poem. For me, it offers a unique opportunity to speculate not only on what "Soul" signifies, especially since it is emphasized and differentiated by its own line and capitalization, but also what meaning it has that "Brain" does not.
In conclusion, I have produced my version of Dickinson's poem "I felt a Funeral" as a direct invitation to the reader to participate in her interpretation of the poem without directing her views with editorial comments like changing a dash to a comma, un-capitalizing a key word, or regularizing a line break. My discussion of the importance of Dickinson's punctuation, capitalization, and stanzaic pattern hopefully have not imposed a particular meaning on the poem. Essays which do encourage particular interpretations of the poem are included under "For Further Readings," as are other essays on Dickinson's innovative style.
Bingham, Millicent Todd. Ancestor's Brocades: The Literary Debut of Emily Dickinson. New York, Harper & Brothers, 1945.
---. "Poems of Emily Dickinson: Hitherto Published Only in Part." The New England Quarterly 20 (1947): 3-50.
Dickinson Editing Collective. Dickinson Electronic Archives.
Franklin, R.W. The Editing of Emily Dickinson: A Reconsideration. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967.
---, ed. The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson. vol 1. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap of Harvard University Press, 1981. 2 vols.
Johnson, Thomas H., ed. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. vol 1. Including variant readings critically compared with all known manuscripts. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap of Harvard University Press, 1955. 3 vols.
Ladin, Jay. "Breaking the Line: Emily Dickinson and William Carlos Williams." The Emily Dickinson Journal 3 (1994): 41-58. See also http://www.colorado.edu/EDIS/journal/articles/III.1.Ladin.html
Maun, Caroline. "Editorial Policy in The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Third Series." The Emily Dickinson Journal 3 (1994): 56-77. See also http://www.colorado.edu/EDIS/journal/articles/III.2.Maun.html
McGann, Jerome J. A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.
Shillingsburg, Peter l. Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age. 3rd ed. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996.
Smith, Martha Nell. "Editing Emily Dickinson's Manuscripts." forthcoming in The Emily Dickinson Handbook, ed. Gudrun Grabher, Roland Hagenbuchle and Cristanne Miller. Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 1998.
---. Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson. Austin, University of Texas Press, 1992.
Todd, Mabel Loomis, ed. The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Third Series. 1914 edition.
http://www.hti.umich.edu/bin/amv-idx.pl?type=header&id=DickiPoem3
Cameron, Sharon. Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979.
Denman, Kamilla. "Emily Dickinson's Volcanic Punctuation" Emily Dickinson: A Collection of Critical Essays. ed. Judith Farr. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996. 187-205. See also http://www.colorado.edu/EDIS/journal/articles/II.1.Denman.html
McCall, Dan. "'I Felt a Funeral in My Brain' and 'The Hollow of the Three Hills." The New England Quarterly 42 (1969): 432-35.
McGann, Jerome. "Emily Dickinson's Visible Language." Emily Dickinson: A Collection of Critical Essays. ed. Judith Farr. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996. 248-259.
Peschel, Richard E., and Enid Rhodes Peschel. "'Am I in Heaven Now?' Case History, Literary Histories." Soundings 66 (1983): 469-80.
Sciarra, T. "A Woman Looking Inward." Dickinson Studies 39 (1981): 36-40.
Stein, William B. "Emily Dickinson's Parodic Masks." University Review 36 (1969): 49-55.
Werner, Marta L. Emily Dickinson's Open Folios; Scenes of Reading, Surfaces of Writing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995.
An analysis of the hypertext 1998 version
Further Reading