University of Virginia Library

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: 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:

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]