723.1863.Have any like Myself

ED’s alternate words in parentheses:

Have any like Myself
Investigating March,
New Houses on the Hill descried—
And possibly a Church—

That were not, We are sure—
As lately as the Snow—
And are Today—if We exist—
Though how may this be so?

Have any like Myself
Conjectured Who may be
The Occupants of the Adobes—
So easy to the Sky—

Twould seem that God should be
The nearest Neighbor to—
And Heaven—a convenient Grace
For Show, or Company—

Have any like Myself
Preserved the Charm secure (Vision sure, Vision clear)
By shunning carefully the Place (Spot, Site)
All Seasons of the Year,

Excepting March—’Tis then
My (The) Villages be seen—
And possibly a Steeple—
Not afterward—by Men—

In Line 13, ED omitted the contracting apostrophe of “‘Twould”, which is not her usual practice (Fr574). Both Johnson (1955) and Franklin (1998) emend her omission, which seems reasonable to me. In Line 18, I prefer ED’s alternative “Vision clear” over “Charm secure” because it emphasizes that ED realizes the “Villages” are a “Vision”, not real. In Line 19, I prefer “Spot” over “Place” because of its alliteration with “shunning” and the firm sound of the final “t”. In Line 22, I like the possessiveness of “My” better than the alternative “The”.

In New England March, bright blue skies and puffy white clouds occasionally break the dreariness of winter. It’s hard to resist a walk on such a day, and if a poet feels her imagination stirring, she could easily see houses and a steeple in the clouds behind a hill’s horizon. Return tomorrow, it’s likely gone, “Not [seen] afterward – by Men –”.

Stanzas 1-3 describe this mystical village and conjecture who lives there. Her first two lines of Stanza 4 (L9-10) guess that God should live there because the village lies between Earth and Heaven.

Then, suddenly, Lines L11-L12 slam a question in our face. Is “Heaven – a convenient Grace / For Show, or Company?” What happened to the village in the sky with new houses and a steepled church? That question about Heaven sure seems skeptical and even sarcastic to me.

A village that appears once a century is an old German motif, most recently revisited in Brigadoon (1947 musical by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe). Brigadoon’s precursor, ‘Germelshausen’ is an 1860 German story by Friedrich Gerstäcker about a young artist being forever separated from his love, but the motif predates 1860.

“A cursed village that sank into the earth long ago is permitted to appear for only one day every century. The protagonist happens to be traversing the area as Germelshausen appears. He encounters, and becomes smitten with, a young woman from the village. The romantic tale ends with him leaving the vicinity just in time to avoid becoming entombed with the village and its denizens, but thereby he loses the love of his life.”

ED’s village appears once a year, but the result is the same, gender reversed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germelshausen

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After commenting on Poems 1-763 (Franklin) on The Prowling Bee’, I am convinced that (virtually) all of Emily Dickinson’s (ED’s) poems have a factual historical level in addition to their various poetic levels of meaning. The reason for her instant and continuing public adulation (1890 - present) was and is, by far, poetic. She is one of the "Greats" that she always dreamed to be, despite her lifelong refusal to publish. That refusal freed her from criticism and allowed her to explore the outer boundaries of poetic power.

More than a century of scholarly research has resulted in somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 books and published academic papers about ED. A large majority of these publications focus only on the “poetic levels” of one or more of ED’s poems. Publications that consider both the “historic level” and “poetic levels” comprise a small minority. Publications that focus only on the factual history of her life probably number less than 100. (All numbers in this paragraph are my estimates.)

Unfortunately for ED’s universe of readers, these two basic levels (historical and poetic) cannot be separated into two ivory towers. Every history-level publication that I know of includes at least some discussion of the poetic level(s).

The reverse is not true. In fact, authors of the “poetry-level” school seem to avoid commenting on the historical level, sometimes admonishing that a poem must stand on its own, without concern for its historical roots. To my knowledge, there are (virtually) no published “history-level” books or articles that totally ignore ED’s poems and their poetic levels.

Of course, ED’s refusal to publish her poems was only possible because of lifelong financial and daily social/housekeeping support by her family, especially her father and sister, respectively. In addition, throughout her life, the Dickinsons hired servants, first Negro and later Irish, some of whom became much more than housekeepers for ED.

My point is that our appreciation of ED's poems can be enhanced by understanding both poetic and historical levels of her sound and sense. We impoverish ourselves if we ignore their historical base.