802.1864.The spry Arms of the Wind

802.1864.The spry Arms of the Wind
“About early 1864, in pencil on both sides of an envelope addressed to Miss Emily Dickinson (a140)” (Franklin 1998)

I prefer all three of ED’s alternate words (parentheses in Lines 1 & 10):

The spry (long) Arms of the Wind
If I could crawl between
I have an errand imminent
To an adjoining Zone—

I should not care to stop
My Process is not long
The Wind could wait without the Gate
Or stroll the Town among.

To ascertain the House
And is (if) the soul (soul’s) at Home
And hold the Wick of mine to it
To light, and then return—

My interpretation of ‘The spry Arms of the Wind’ in three prose paragraphs, one for each stanza:

Stanza 1: “The (long) Arms of the Wind” separate Earth and Heaven, which is “an adjoining Zone”. I would like to “crawl between” those “Arms” because I have “an errand imminent” in Heaven.

Stanza 2: Not only is my “errand imminent”, it will also be quick: “My process is not long”. ED then suggests “The Wind could wait outside the Gate / Or stroll the Town” within, AKA Heaven.

Stanza 3: My “errand imminent” is to “ascertain the House” where Wadsworth’s soul lives “and, if the soul’s at Home”, to “hold the Wick of my soul to it / to light, and then return” to Earth with Wadsworth’s flame of “Life Force”, her muse’s poetic inspiration, the thing that makes my life worth living.

……………………………………

802.1864.The spry Arms of the Wind
“About early 1864, in pencil on both sides of an envelope addressed to Miss Emily Dickinson (a140)” (Franklin 1998)

I prefer all three of ED’s alternate words (parentheses in Lines 1 & 10):

The spry (long) Arms of the Wind
If I could crawl between
I have an errand imminent
To an adjoining Zone—

I should not care to stop
My Process is not long
The Wind could wait without the Gate
Or stroll the Town among.

To ascertain the House
And is (if) the soul (soul’s) at Home
And hold the Wick of mine to it
To light, and then return—

My interpretation of ‘The spry Arms of the Wind’ in three prose paragraphs, one for each stanza:

……………………………………

Franklin (1998) describes the Fr802 manuscript: “About early 1864, in pencil on both sides of an envelope addressed to “Miss Emily Dickinson” (a140). The “a140” indicates this manuscript is Item “#140 in the Amherst College Emily Dickinson collection. In 1958, Mabel Todd’s daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham, gave ED’s manuscripts of Fr801 and Fr802 (a140 and a438) to the Amherst College Library. (Google AI)

My inference is that ED wrote Fr801 on the first envelope Eliza sent to ED, folded it, and placed it inside a cover envelope that she addressed to Eliza.

What Franklin doesn’t tell us is that the folded envelope with ED’s poem “on both sides” includes her last two lines on the outside of the flap used to seal the original envelope and that her last two poem lines straddle Eliza’s elegantly written “Miss Emily Dickinson”. Eliza indicated the double “ss” in “Miss” with the German “eszett” symbol, ß.

Eliza knew ED would recognize the “eszett” symbol because in 1847, when ED was 16, she and Eliza had studied German together at Amherst Academy (Habegger 2001). Given this information, when ED wrote Fr802 the friendship between her and Eliza had lasted 17 years (1847-1864).

For a list of reasons why I think both Fr801 and Fr802 are about Wadsworth, see my explication of Fr801 on the ED-LarryB blog.

Franklin, R. W. 1998. THE POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON: VARIORUM EDITION. Edited by R. W. Franklin. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 1998. vi + 1654 pp.

Habegger, Alfred. 2001. My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

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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.