Hello Friends,
Today’s jottings on the backs of envelopes are the original handwriting of Emily Dickinson — coming to you because of a gift given to me: Cathy gave me a copy of The Gorgeous Nothings, a beautiful reproduction of Emily Dickinson manuscripts released at the end of 2013. Dickinson experiments with the shape of the page in these works — there’s not a regular rectangle in the bunch — like the flap of envelope 252 above follows the taper of the poem from a longer line to a single word.
Dickinson then nearly runs out of room to write “Words” in the righthand taper of envelope 320 — I don’t think Dickinson actually believes that each word holds only one possible meaning, like a scabbard holds only one sword. For instance, she’s quite aware here that she’s using “One Bird” to embody all the wonders of music and the natural world. I think she means that words are as much manmade tools as swords are, and feeble in comparison to their task of trying to capture the beauty of the world around us, trying to capture even just one note of one bird.
E.E. Cummings has a line about “one bird” as well — it makes me wonder if Cummings could’ve ever read Dickinson’s envelope 320. He says, “I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing / than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.” There’s something about teaching stars not to dance that sounds a bit like putting each star away in its scabbard …which makes me think of a dozen other poems. Ok, better wrap this up:
The release of The Gorgeous Nothings coincided with the release of a vast, if not quite as gorgeous, new online archive of Emily Dickinson’s original manuscripts at EDickinson.org/ — explore if you’re interested! It could prove to be an exciting model for more libraries, trusts, and academic institutions to collaborate with each other in compiling their original manuscript holdings in the future.
I hope you’re enjoying National Poetry Month!
— Ellen