806.1864.Partake as doth the Bee

806.1864.Partake as doth the Bee,

ED’s alternate Lines 3-4 in parentheses:

Partake as doth the Bee,
Abstemiously.
The Rose is an Estate— (I know the Family)
In Sicily. (In Tripoli).

Johnson (1955) tells us:

“The diary of ED’s cousin, Perez Dickinson Cowan, who was graduated from Amherst College in 1866, under date of 26 April 1864, records that ED presented him with a bouquet of flowers with this poem [Variant 803B] enclosed as a note.”

Perez Dickinson Cowan (1843-1923) was born and raised in Knoxville, Tennessee. He was 20 or 21 when ED wrote this poem. Tennessee was a Confederate state, and Cowan was a student at Amherst College during the Civil War. East Tennessee leaned toward the Union, as did Cowan’s family, and ED’s father was Cowan’s uncle once removed, which may explain Cowan’s presence at Amherst College, a safe refuge for a draft-age, privileged southern boy.

That Perez graduated late, at age 23 in 1866, and after Lee’s 1865 surrender, supports this conjecture.

ED tells us, “I know the Family”. Also, her three-syllabled “Tripoli” is likely a camouflaged alliteration for three-syllabled “Tennessee”. Clearly, ED was being extremely careful to avoid implicating her second cousin or his Knoxville family in draft-dodging.

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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.