Considering a Dickinson Poem

One of the many arguments over the reclusive 19th century American poet, Emily Dickinson, includes the one directed at editors who regularize Dickinson's idiosyncratic style-her many dashes, her haphazard capitalization, and her sometimes irregular use of spacing. I can sympathize with those editors who wish to make Dickinson's poems more palatable for readers, but now and then I have found instances where the editor's regularization has limited the poet's meaning. That is the case with the poem, "There has been a Death, in the Opposite House." Poetry textbook editors Laurence Perrine (Sound and Sense), Louis Simpson (Introduction to Poetry), and Robert N. Linscott (Selected Poems and Letters of Emily Dickinson) alter the text of Dickinson's poem #389 (Thomas H. Johnson's The Complete Poems) in a way that, I suggest, weakens the total impact of the poem. That slight alteration is the omission of the empty line separating the last line of the fifth stanza from the preceding three. That omission regularizes the stanza, resulting in six four-line stanzas. Closing up stanza five gives the poem a uniform appearance but limits Dickinson's meaning.

Considering the meaning of the line that Dickinson separated from the rest of the stanza, I suggest that she had a specific reason for the separation. The line, "There'll be that Dark Parade," indicates that a funeral procession will soon be seen.* The lines preceding this one state that various persons who serve the dead will be appearing, including the "Man / Of the Appalling Trade - / To take the measure of the House." The funeral procession, "that Dark Parade," will occur after the measurement of the house and will literally separate itself from the house; and Dickinson, to show this progression concretely, separated the line from the rest of the stanza, whose last word is "House."

By regularizing Dickinson's stanza, the editors make her poem look neater, but they eliminate the special nuance of meaning that Dickinson achieved in her original.

To read the poem and compare Dickinson's stanza to the altered versions of certain editors, please visit "There's been a Death, in the Opposite House."

*In Thomas H. Johnson's The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, the line is not attached to the previous three. Johnson restored Dickinson's poems to their original forms. Her own handwritten version of the poem can be seen in R. W. Franklin's The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson.

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