III
Before the variants were edited into the lines of the main texts in
Johnson's edition, certain corrections had to be made in the edition itself.
As Jay Leyda notes in his valuable review,[25] the thoroughness of the edition
throws the
smallest errors into sharp relief. Because these errors and other new
discoveries affecting Johnson's edition are not widely known, it is perhaps
worthwhile to detail here the modifications made in The Poems of
Emily Dickinson for the concordance. The edition actually used for
the concordance was not the 1955 first printing of the first edition, but the
1958 second printing. The differences—with one important
exception—are to be found in such minor alterations as the change
of
"Appendixes" to the less grammatically controversial "Appendix" and the
printing right side up of a line of type that appears upside down in the first
printing. The important exception is the list entitled "Corrections" that is
hidden
away on the verso of the appendix title page of the second printing. The
substantive changes in the poetry itself to be found in this list are the
corrections of "teases"
to "teazes" (#319, l. 6), "has" to "had" (#1254, l. 1 of the worksheet
draft), "revelry" to "revery" (#1526, l. 12 of the Todd transcript), "the" to
"a" (#87, l. 2).
[26] Also adopted in the
concordance were corrections of errors noted by Charles R. Anderson;
these include changes of "the" to "this (#1068, l. 11 of the copy sent to
Niles), the addition of a dash at the end of a line (#1271, l. 7), and the
addition of "swift" to the list of variants for the phrase "sudden legacy" in
the worksheet draft of #1333.
[27]
Corrections I have made while preparing Johnson's text for the computer
include changes of "unknow" to "unknown" (#78, l. 8 of the pencilled
copy), "Feet" to "Fete" (#794, variant note to l. 16), "world" to "would"
(#1133, variant note to l. 8), "he" to "her" (#1496, variant note to l. 11),
and "departure" to "departing" (#1773, variant note to l. 3).
[28]
In his review of Johnson's edition, Leyda also noted that the number
of poems in Emily Dickinson's canon was less that the 1775 given by
Johnson because in three instances, poems numbered separately are actually
versions of other poems.[29] After
writing his review Leyda discovered that the last poem in the canon was a
stanza from a variant version of #1068 ("Further in Summer than the
Birds").[30] These important
modifications of Johnson's edition are noted in the preface to the
concordance, but Johnson's original numbering was not changed because of
the possible confusions that would result for the reader if all the numbers
after #331 were changed. The principle followed in emending Johnson's
text was to adopt substantive corrections involving the addition or deletion
of words in the poems, but not to include corrections of the ordering of
words or the numbering of poems.
Another editorial problem related to Johnson's numbering of the
poems was the difficulty of identifying the poems merely by their
numbers. Only twenty-six
[31] of the
poems in Emily Dickinson's canon have titles supplied by the poet herself.
Contrary to the prevalent thinking in telephone companies and the Post
Office, numbers alone are not particularly easy things to remember. Not
very many readers know the Psalms by their numbers and even fewer can
identify Shakespeare's sonnets by theirs; it did not seem reasonable,
therefore, that there would be any more readers familiar enough with Emily
Dickinson's poems to identify them simply by their numbers. And to
identify the lines of a poem only by number would render the concordance
practically useless for any one using it with an edition or an anthology that
does not give Johnson's numbering of the poems. The alternative for the
editor of a concordance of making up titles for 1,749 poems was also
unattractive—particularly since this had been tried with rather
horrible
results in the first editions of Emily Dickinson's poems. The
problem of identifying her poems in the concordance was solved by using
as a "title" as much of the first line of each poem as the format of the
concordance allowed. This turned out to be twenty-four spaces. In these
were put all the complete words of the first line that would fit. In several
cases this solution meant that two poems had similar titles,—as, for
example, with "The Butterfly's" (#1244) and "The Butterfly's Numidian"
(#1387). Another possible solution to the problem of titles was to use parts
of words in handling similar first lines, but this was abandoned; besides
creating ugly and non-existent words, this method had rather ambiguous
possibilities when applied to the shortening of, for example, the third word
in "The Butterfly's Assumption". The twenty-six titles that Emily Dickinson
herself used were treated as lines in the concordance and indexed along
with the lines of the poems. The only difference here was that in place of
a line number the symbol "T" was used to
indicate the "line" in question was actually the title of a poem.
The following excerpt from the concordance illustrates the manner in
which the shortened first lines were used to identify the lines of the poems.
It also shows how brackets and the "V" were used to handle variants in the
concordance.
INDEX WORD |
TEXT |
FIRST LINE |
POEM |
LINE |
DRUM |
|
AND BRING THE FIFE, AND TRUMPET, AND BEAT UPON
THE DRUM-- |
AWAKE YE MUSES NINE, |
1 |
39 |
|
A SERVICE, LIKE A DRUM--.............. |
I FELT A FUNERAL, IN MY |
280 |
6 |
|
FIRM TO THE DRUM--.................. |
UNTO LIKE STORY—TROUBLE |
295 |
18 |
|
THE EARTH HAS SEEMED TO ME A DRUM,.... |
WHEN I HAVE SEEN THE SUN |
888 |
7 |
|
SUBSEQUENT A DRUM—................. |
THE POPULAR HEART IS A |
1226 |
2 |
|
BEFORE THE QUICK [RIPE / PEAL / DRUM / DRUMS /
BELLS / BOMB /... |
ONE JOY OF SO MUCH |
1420 |
6 |
|
AS IF A DRUM [THE DRUMS] WENT ON AND ON. |
THE PANG IS MORE |
1530 |
V |
DRUMMER |
|
THAT LIT THE DRUMMER FROM THE CAMP... |
GOOD NIGHT! WHICH PUT |
259 |
11 |
DRUMS |
|
IT IS AS IF A HUNDRED DRUMS............ |
I HAVE A KING, WHO DOES |
103 |
8 |
|
OF THEIR UNTHINKING DRUMS--.......... |
I DREADED THAT FIRST |
348 |
28 |
|
DRUMS OFF THE PHANTOM BATTLEMENTS... |
OVER AND OVER, LIKE A |
367 |
3 |
|
ARE DRUMS TOO NEAR—................. |
INCONCEIVABLY SOLEMN! |
582 |
15 |
|
THE DRUMS TO HEAR--................. |
INCONCEIVABLY SOLEMN! |
582 |
V15 |
|
AS COOL [DISTINCT] AS SATYR'S
DRUMS—..... |
DID YOU EVER STAND IN A |
590 |
14 |
This excerpt also indicates how the format of the concordance takes care of
lines longer than forty-six spaces by doubling them back and omitting the
spaced dots that link a single line with its first-line title. Lines longer than
sixty-nine spaces—all that an eighty-space IBM card could
consistently
handle in addition to poem and line numbers—had to be divided. The
shortness of Emily Dickinson's lines, even when extended with inserted
variants, seldom made this procedure necessary—and then only when
variants had been inserted into the lines. Line 6 of #1420, for example,
appears with all its variants as follows:
BEFORE THE QUICK [ RIPE / PEAL / DRUM / DRUMS / BELLS
/ BOMB / BURST / FLAGS / STEP / TICK / SHOUTS / PINK / RED /
BLADE] OF DAY
The first part of this line, followed by an ellipsis, is given in the excerpt
from the concordance. The second part of the line would be preceded by
an ellipsis in the concordance; in this particular example, however, the line
had to be divided into three parts, and the middle section of the line is both
preceded and followed by ellipses.
One very important feature of the format of the concordance is the
arrangement of lines under an index word. As the excerpt reveals, the lines
are arranged according to Johnson's numbering of the poems, and this
means that they appear in approximate chronological order. A table keying
the poem numbers to their assigned dates of composition in Johnson's
edition will appear in the preface to the concordance,
thus permitting the user to examine at a glance the chronological use of any
indexed word in Emily Dickinson's poetry.
[32]
The last major editorial decision that had to be faced before giving
Emily Dickinson to the machine concerned the kinds of words to be omitted
from the concordance. For reasons primarily of cost it is not feasible to
index every occurrence of non-essential words such as "a" and "the". To
list every occurrence of these two particular words in Emily Dickinson's
poetry would involve the addition of 2,680 and 6,134 lines respectively to
the concordance—an increase of approximately ten per cent in the
bulk
of the concordance. The number of these kinds of words omitted from the
concordance is quite small, compared to the number customarily omitted
from manual concordances; the only consideration here was space, whereas
the sheer labor involved in a hand concordance makes it desirable to omit
as many words as possible. The following is a list of the principal words
omitted from the indexing of the concordance; in addition, all forms of
these words—plurals, contractions, etc.—were
also omitted:
a although an and another at both but can could each either for from
here how however if in into it itself must no nor not now of on or other
should so than that the their them then there therefore these they this those
though through thus to too upon what when where whether which who why
would
Also deleted were all forms of the verbs "do" and "have", and all forms of
the verb "to be" except "be" itself which was kept because of Emily
Dickinson's unusual and extensive use of its subjunctive form. "Like" and
"as" were retained to provide lists of Emily Dickinson's similes. Also kept
in were pronouns that are almost always omitted from concordances,
manual or machine. All occurrences of "I", "we", "you", "he", and "she"
together with their other forms will appear in the concordance because of
their relevance to biographical and "persona" studies.
Some recent studies have shown, however, that these so-called
"non-significant" words omitted from the concordance are actually very
important in analyses of style.[33] But
for those who need these words
in studying Emily Dickinson, all is far from lost. It is possible to retrieve
them from the complete tape of the concordance which will be stored at
Cornell University and available to anyone who wishes to analyze Emily
Dickinson's poetry in ways beyond what the concordance allows.
[34]