Eddie Thomas, who ordinarily philosophizes, ventures into poetry analysis — of very bad poetry, but poetry nonetheless. He chooses “Your Guess Is As Good As Mine,” by the Derailers, a honky-tonk band I’ve never heard of. The lyrics run:

Every time we talk, you keep asking me
Where our hearts are headed and how it’s gonna be
Well it’s too soon to tell, I can’t make that call
I’m not a fortune teller, I don’t have a crystal ball

Your guess is good as mine, I’m playing it by ear
And I’m not really sure, where we go from here
Where our love will lead, we may learn in time
Baby your guess is good as mine

Don’t worry ’bout tomorrow, forget about the past
Let’s enjoy the moment, don’t leave the best for last
There may come a day when we can reminisce
Right now we better concentrate on every single kiss

Eddie finds a good deal in this doggerel: “[W]hy is she concerned about the future so early in the relationship? Isn’t it likely that she’s deciding if he’s worth giving it up for? And isn’t his worth exactly what he is trying to get her not to think about? This isn’t carpe diem exactly, and I don’t think he’s concentrating on every single kiss, but I wish him luck.”

One difficulty here lies with the term carpe diem, which is not so simple as it appears. One version is a plain celebration of youth, which one might call naive carpe diem. The locus classicus of this theme in English is Robert Herrick’s “To the Virgins, To Make Much of Time.” This poem celebrates youth: “That age is best which is the first,/ When youth and blood are warmer.” Herrick, a clergyman by trade, piously and disinteredstedly advises the virgins to marry while they’re young.

Unlike Herrick, his contemporary, Andrew Marvell, in “To His Coy Mistress,” has an agenda, and makes no bones about it: “And your quaint honor turn to dust,/ And into ashes all my lust.” He evinces no desire for marriage, and such love as he has for his mistress is subjunctive. Perhaps with world enough, and time, “My vegetable love should grow/ Vaster than empires, and more slow”; but without it love doesn’t even enter the picture. “To His Coy Mistress” might be classified decadent carpe diem. The poem’s extremely high polish conceals its cold-bloodedness. Marvell even refers to himself in the third person in the title, as if to emphasize his distance from the scene. Although I find things to admire in this poem, I don’t, unlike Eddie, wish the poet luck in his designs — assuming they are real, and the poem is not merely an academic exercise.

The Derailers’ song is more like Marvell’s poem than Herrick’s. What both versions of carpe diem share, however, is a tightly circumscribed view of experience. It abstracts away everything that is not immediate experience, which is most of what makes humans human. Eddie wonders whether his reading is private. I don’t think so. He interests himself in what is not stated in the poem, which is legitimate, provided it bears on what is stated. By doing so Eddie indirectly points up what makes carpe diem always a minor theme.

I look forward to the day one of the Derailers self-Googles and happens on this exchange.

(Update: Eddie comments, wondering if there is “a loss of truth” when song lyrics lose their music. I would say there is a loss of power. Poetry, at its best, depends largely on subtle metrical effects, which music swamps, so song lyrics that employ them are largely wasted. I remember my favorite songs for their music, and only incidentally for their lyrics. The only band I know whose lyrics are interesting by themselves is mid-70s Pink Floyd.)

Eve Tushnet, whom I have stupidly neglected to add to my blogroll until now, posts the world’s greatest cat poem, really more an eccentric sermon, by Christopher Smart (1722-1781), considered by many to be the first mad poet in English history. Smart was locked up periodically for praying incessantly in the street. His friend Dr. Johnson didn’t like it, and neither do I.

The unsuspecting reader who opens Emily Dickinson for the first time, in the orthodox modern version, confronts something like this:

I started Early — Took my Dog —
And visited the Sea —
The Mermaids in the Basement
Came out to look at me —

And Frigates — in the Upper Floor
Extended Hempen Hands —
Presuming Me to be a Mouse —
Aground — upon the Sands —

But no Man moved Me — till the Tide —
Went past my simple Shoe —
And past my Apron — and my Belt
And past my Bodice — too —

And made as He would eat me up —
As wholly as a Dew
Upon a Dandelion’s Sleeve —
And then — I started — too —

And He — He followed — close behind —
I felt His Silver Heel
Upon my Ankle — Then my Shoes
Would overflow with Pearl —

Until We met the Solid Town —
No One He seemed to know —
And bowing — with a Mighty look —
At me — The Sea withdrew —

So what’s with the dashes and the capitalization? Nothing, basically. Dickinson’s sentence structure is not loose or complex, and the dashes can be replaced by ordinary punctuation in nearly every instance. This labor is left for the reader who wishes to make sense of the poem. Sometimes the dashes are worse than a nuisance. In the second stanza the dashes surrounding “aground” turn a restrictive clause into a non-restrictive one. The dashes surrounding “too” in the third and fourth stanzas, if read as elocution marks, spoil the rhythm of the poem.

The capitalization is similar. In this poem she mostly capitalizes her nouns and adjectives, with a few exceptions. “Me” is lower-case about half the time. “Took,” a verb, is capitalized (stanza 1), while “look,” a noun, is not (stanza 6). The organizing principle is not apparent because the organizing principle is non-existent. A reader who wishes to make sense of the fine poem that is buried underneath this detritus has to translate first, in a sense. The effort would be more profitably spent reading the poem itself. Many readers, I’m sure, are put off enough not to make the effort at all.

This mess is largely Dickinson’s fault. She notoriously failed to prepare her poems for publication, leaving them instead, hand-written, almost illegibly, in little bundles, or “fascicles” (who was it who said that sounds like Mussolini’s favorite dessert?), in many cases with several variations preserved, among which the put-upon editor is forced to choose. Take a look at this manuscript, of one of her best poems, “Safe in their alabaster chambers.”

Every one of those tiny marks between words is now in the authorized version of this poem as an em-dash, and the man single-handedly responsible for this fact is Thomas W. Johnson, a former Harvard English professor. Johnson did yeoman scholarly service when he published, in 1955, a three-volume edition of Dickinson’s poems, collating all manuscripts, including all variants, and allowing, but also requiring, any sufficiently interested reader to write out the best version of a poem. In 1960, Johnson published a one-volume Complete Poems, containing what he considered to be the “definitive” versions. The dashes have been with us ever since.

Now it should be obvious that a manuscript in this state cannot be published as-is. To begin with, there are three quite different versions of the second stanza. (It might also be a three-stanza poem with two variations on the third stanza; it’s hard to tell.) For Dickinson this is not unusual. More than half of her manuscripts contain multiple versions of at least one word; many of lines, and even stanzas, like this one. There are also multiple manuscripts for quite a few poems, and of course these differ among themselves as well. They need a real editor, not a transcriber.

Johnson usually tries to solve this problem by choosing the last version, based on a dubious analysis of how Dickinson’s handwriting changed as she aged. But she left all of the versions, not just one, and it’s mind-reading to assume, with none of them crossed out, that the last is what she wanted. As Yvor Winters wrote, “The only thing one can do in a situation like this is to choose the best versions; this takes talent, and Johnson lacks talent.” Lacking talent, Johnson attempts to reduce the problem of editing Dickinson to application of mechanical criteria. His criteria always fail to produce the best version and sometimes fail to produce a version at all. This very manuscript of “Safe in their alabaster chambers” defeats him; he ends up offering two versions; he cannot choose.

In the 19th century editors used to edit, often with unfortunate results. A mid-century edition of the works of George Washington renders a small sum of money, “as but a flea-bite at present” in the original, as “totally inadequate to our demands at this time.” By comparison Emily Dickinson received very gentle treatment from her first editors, Mabel Loomis Todd and Martha Dickinson Bianchi, the poet’s niece. They regularized her spelling and punctuation, showed some flair in negotiating the manuscript variants, and otherwise left her pretty much alone. In a dozen or so cases Todd substitutes words for which there is no textual warrant. (Bianchi, her successor, is clean on this score.) She notoriously changes “what a billow be” to “what a wave must be” in “I never saw a moor”; the poem is hopeless in either version. And she actually improves one of Dickinson’s greatest poems, “There’s a certain slant of light,” by changing “heft” in the first stanza to “weight.”

Later critics have jumped all over Todd for this, apparently preferring Johnson’s consistent approach, which wrecks all of the poems. But Todd and Bianchi do the hard work that Johnson leaves to the reader. This is Bianchi’s version of “I started early”:

I started early, took my dog,
And visited the sea;
The mermaids in the basement
Came out to look at me,

And frigates in the upper floor
Extended hempen hands,
Presuming me to be a mouse
Aground, upon the sands.

But no man moved me till the tide
Went past my simple shoe,
And past my apron and my belt,
And past my bodice too,

And made as he would eat me up
As wholly as a dew
Upon a dandelion’s sleeve —
And then I started too.

And he — he followed close behind;
I felt his silver heel
Upon my ankle, — then my shoes
Would overflow with pearl.

Until we met the solid town,
No man he seemed to know;
And bowing with a mighty look
At me, the sea withdrew.

Which one would you rather read?

(Update: AC Douglas comments.)