SOMETHING ALIVE IN MAY SWENSON 241To Bishop this poem felt overemphatic and too vernacular. Swenson had to
defend “the constructions of ‘cut me a long’ and ‘filled me a glass’—I used
them as Westernisms, they came naturally, this being the way we used to talk
out there when I was little (they still talk like that in my state). The knife is there
to point up that she ’s doing something tomboyish, which her mother objects
to.” When “The Centaur” reached book form, nothing had changed. However
Bishop heard the end, Swenson got it right, for a girl’s nascent imagination:
“Rob Roy, he pulled some clover / as we crossed the field.” She really had chomped
some grass.
Emily Dickinson, a kindred spirit or feisty maiden aunt, spoke to May Swen-
son. For one thing, she took heart from Dickinson’s skepticism. Swenson left
religion behind, “It seems to me a redundancy for a poet.” She also took Emily
personally, deploring the retouched daguerreotype a 1924 editor had used for
the Amherst recluse: curls displacing straight bound-back hair, bangs veiling
the forehead, lips and eyebrows accentuated, white ruffles instead of the dark
neckband, black bodice turned white, and the right hand that was resting on a
book—totally cropped. All in all, robbed of her peculiar strength.
Robbed of her poems, too. Swenson fumes at the newspaper editor who
printed “A narrow Fellow in the Grass” without Dickinson’s consent, taming
her “complex depths” with punctuation and slapping a title, “The Snake,” on
Emily Dickinson, ca.
Amherst College Archives and
Special Collections, by permission of
the Trustees of Amherst College.Emily Dickinson, retouched
dageurreotype, 1924.
By permission of the Houghton Library,
Harvard University MS Am 1118.15.a.