About the Dickinson Parser
Background
This project is inspired by Susan Howe's attentive scholarship on Emily Dickinson, most notably her article, "These Flames and Generosities of the Heart," in which she questions the editorial practices of those who have brought Dickinson's poems into print.1 Many if not most readers of Dickinson have encountered her work through the Belknap editions of Harvard University Press edited by either Thomas Johnson or more recently Ralph Franklin.2 And most readers assume, as Howe initially did, that these editors "had given us the poems as they looked" when Dickinson wrote them, the way she intended them.3 But a look at the manuscript facsimiles of Dickinson's poems (also published by Belknap) reveals "that in a system of restricted exchange, the subject-creator and her art in its potential gesture were domesticated and occluded by an assumptive privileged Imperative."4 This imperative, which determines a definition of poetry based on a literary culture and system from which Dickinson removed herself, forces the anomalous poet's work into a conventional package in the process of translating her poems into print. In other words, Dickinson's manuscripts reveal the extent to which her editors regularized and conventionalized her poetry for publication.Since Harvard University gained ownership of Dickinson's manuscript, it was the prerogative of Harvard's chosen editors to decide how to frame or present Dickinson in their editions of her work. In a personal letter to Susan Howe, Ralph Franklin reveals some of the editorial choices: "He told me the notebooks were not artistic structures and were not intended for other readers; Dickinson had a long history of sending poems to people — individual poems — that were complete, he said. My suggestion about line breaks depended on an 'assumption' that one reads in lines; he asked, 'what happens if the form lurking in the mind is the stanza?' [my italics]."5 Thus, in making their own assumptions about the forms lurking in Dickinson's mind, her editors become authors. They claim the authority to take Dickinson's work and reprint it the way they see fit. And because, for many years, Dickinson's manuscripts were not available to the public, readers had no way of knowing what discrepancies lay between the manuscripts and the print versions of her poems.
The problem is not that the Belknap editors made choices in how to bring Dickinson's atypical work into the standardization of print (all translators have to make difficult choices, after all) but that they obscured the fact that they were making choices and asserted that their editions, their ways of reading Dickinson, are definitive and authoritative. But the implicit question that Howe raises in response to these so called authoritative editions, "how are we to know what Dickinson intended, and what if Dickinson's editors' assumptions have been wrong?" Thus, Howe proposes an alternate imperative: to return to Dickinson's manuscripts as the authoritative documents. It was Howe's insistence on the manuscripts that has led me to the concept of the Dickinson Parser.
Purpose
Leafing through R.W. Franklin's manuscript edition of Dickinson's work, it is difficult NOT to read intention behind the visual presentation of her poems on the page. It is difficult to dismiss, as the Belknap editors sometimes did, Dickinson's own poetic and compositional choices as accidental. A particularly striking example is found in the poem "the Sea said," the manuscript of which looks more like a visual art piece or shape poem than a conventional printed poem.6 Despite the seemingly obvious intention evident in Dickinson's orthography, editors have taken liberties, relineating the poem in print so that it conforms to the common measure of the hymnal (giving precedence to the stanza over the line). Here, for example, is Franklin's transcription:The Sea said "Come" to the Brook -
The Brook said "Let me grow" -
The Sea said "then you will be a Sea -
I want a Brook - Come now"!
The Sea said "Go" to the Sea -
The Sea said "I am he
You cherished" - "Learned Waters -
Wisdom is stale - to Me" -
But what if the form dictating the poem were the line? How does our understanding of the poem change if we were to transcribe it based on the lineation of the manuscript, like so:
the Sea said
"Come" to the Brook-
the Brook said
"let me grow"-
the Sea said
"then you will
be a Sea"-
"I want a Brook-
Come now"-
the Sea said
"Go" to the Sea.
the Sea said
"I am he
you cherished"-
"Learned Waters-
Wisdom is stale
to me"—
Does this version bring out more of what the manuscripts held in its awareness of spatial arrangement and form? How does the poem change when it is lineated this way?
I propose that we look at these new transcriptions alongside the standard printed versions using the Dickinson Parser as a tool to help us identify visual and aural patterns in the poem. The Parser allows us to look for patterns in the various versions of the printed poems, thus facilitating a comparison of these multiple versions. The point is not to devalue earlier printed versions, only to show that these earlier versions are not definitive. The Belknap versions provide us with ONE frame for reading Dickinson, against the hymnal and/ or sentimental traditions, for example. And I do think that those are valid readings. But the problem occurs when one version takes precedence over all others. And all of Dickinson's editors seem to have wanted to claim that they are presenting the "real" Dickinson. Since we can know the "real" Dickinson--she is, after all, dead some 120 years--I propose looking at "translations" of her work as a way to interpret it. I am a proponent of translation, because I believe that multiple translations offer multiple ways of seeing/reading a poem. As much as things get lost in translation so too are they found. Translations may help us to see something we haven't seen before just by looking at the "original" poem. And the Parser can be used as a tool for interpretation.
Lost in Translation
I want to point out what the Parser cannot do, what gets lost in translation when transcribing Dickinson's handwriting to print. The Parser can only deal with printed text and thus is meant as a tool to read and identify patterns in printed transcriptions. In any printed version of the poem, we lose the stunning visual quality of Dickinson's orthography. We lose the visual similarity between x's and t's, or y's and s's. We lose the varied length of Dickinson's signature dashes and other punctuation marks (although we can bold out the punctuation to see it's placement within the poem as we shall see below). We might also lose sight of the rhythmic patterns in Dickinson's poem. The Parser cannot read or point out stress patterns in the poem. Thus, I offer the following stress transcription of the poem for comparison:- ' '
' - - '
- ' '
' - '
- ' '
- ' -
' - '
' - - '
' - [ ' '?]
- ' '
' - - '
- ' '
' - '
- ' -
' - ' -
' - - '
- '
And finally, we also lose the presence of space and spatial arrangement on the page. At this point, the parser cannot process a transcription which retains Dickinson's spaces, like this one:
t he S ea said
“Come” to the Brook-
the Brook said
“let me grow ”-
the Sea said
“then you will
be a Sea”-
“I want a Brook-
Come now ”-
the Sea said
“Go” to the Sea.
the Sea said
“I am he
you cherished ”-
“Learned Waters -
Wisdom is stale
to me ” ——————
Such a transcription should be read on its own and in comparison to the transcriptions that the Parser can handle in order to see what Dickinson might have been doing with the spatial arrangement of words on the page. The spatial transcription emphasizes certain groupings of words as the spaces separate them out. For example:
Sea
to the
Brook
and then later. . .
Sea
to the
Sea
The stress patterns of these two sets of lines are identical, which reinforces the idea of that a transformation takes place in the poem: The brook turns into a sea as it grows toward the original sea of the poem. The transformation occurs at around line ten of the poem.
Another such grouping:
Sea
you
Sea ,
is reminiscent of the grouping on the original manuscript where the "you" looks almost like it says "sea"; the "y" is practically an "s" in Dickinson's orthography. The three words 'trickle down' from "me" (Brook): "me sea you sea," suggesting that the transformation is already happening, the brook is becoming a sea.
All of these features are revealed not through the use of the Dickinson Parser but through a comparison of new transcriptions and the manuscript of the poem written in Dickinson's own hand. I propose that the Parser can enhance such comparisons and facilitate readings of the poem.
Found in Translation
One of the functions of the Parser is to highlight the different types of consonants and/or vowles used in the poem. When clicking on the "vowel" button, for example, we notice a predominance of e's and o's (oo's). When reading the poem out loud we might notice too that many of the vowel-sounds are long. Thus, the e-sounds are associated with the "Sea" or the "me" and the o-sounds with the "Brook" or the "you." The Parser helps to reveal how these vowels flow back and forth, flowing down the poem as the Brook becomes a Sea (on the semantic level of the poem). Clicking on the consonant buttons--labial, dorsal, or coronal, reveals similar effects--the coronal, for example, is associated with the Sea, while the labial is associated with the Brook. The dorsal consonants ("c" and "g") refer to the relationship between the two, the "coming" and "going," the flowing and pooling.The "match the following words" feature allows the user to search for patterns of repeated words in the poem. Searching the two key words, "Sea" and "Brook," reveals that these words disappear in the last four lines of the poem, where they are replaced by the all-encompassing "Learned Waters." In other words, by the end of the poem, the "Sea" and the "Brook" can no longer be differentiated.
Thus, the Parser helps to show how the poem operates on three concurrent levels: visual, sonic, and semantic. Very different patterns emerge when the earlier print versions are fed into the Parser, suggesting that the lineation choices that Dickinson's editors have made are consequential. Further comparative study is necessary to see what these earlier print versions lose in translation verses what our new versions gain.
Possibilities
The Dickinson Parser was specifically created to search for patterns in "the Sea said," but any poem can be pasted into the search window and parsed. As such, it will be necessary in the future to add other search features, other consonant groupings, for example. We have limited our search options to labial, dorsal, and coronal consonants here because we were starting out with the knowledge that this specific poem displays a predominance of these types of consonants.Also, although the Parser is visually oriented, the visual patterns that it reveals are closely connected with the sonic or aural patterns of the poem. Future versions of the Parser would ideally incorporate audio interaction as well so that when a user clicks on the "vowels" in the poem, the letters are not only highlighted but are voiced as well.
Please send us suggestions for other possible features to add to the Dickinson Parser.
1. Howe, Susan, "These Flames and Generosities of the Heart: Emily Dickinson and the Illogic of Sumptuary Values" from The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1993. PEPC Edition: http://www.writing.upenn.edu/library/Howe/index.html
2. See Thomas H. Johnson, The poems of Emily Dickinson : including variant readings critically compared with all known manuscripts, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1955); and Franklin, R.W., The poems of Emily Dickinson, variorum ed., 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1998).
3. Howe.
4. Howe. See Franklin, R.W., The manuscript books of Emily Dickinson, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1981).
5. Howe.
6. See http://www.writing.upenn.edu/library/protected/Dickinson/ED_The-Sea-said_set-11_c-1872.jpg
