We live in world where no one can be wrong, we can only be right. To be right is the only way to be a person, someone seen and known, a visible entity. It is not fashionable to revise opinions, to be supple or pliant, to accommodate other points of view. We strike out those who do revise, those who hover and haver. Art is rarely right; it is built upon mistakes, trials and errors, crossings-out, doubt and uncertainty. No reaching after irritable fact and reason as Keats put it in his famous definition of negative capability. This is why I like working with poetry manuscripts. They remind me that all creative thought is thought-in-parts, thought still working itself out, unfinished or incomplete in some way. Fragmentary. Thoughts still building. Emily Dickinson’s manuscripts hover over doubt and uncertainty. Her envelope poems as they have become known (now they are translated into printed form), hover within a realm of doubt and uncertainty, which is the realm of the draft. Here are half-formed thoughts and notations, jottings on scraps of paper, repurposed surfaces covered in faint, inconsistent marks. Fragments we hover over, scratching our heads, wanting to know what did she mean when she wrote:

The way

Hope builds his

House

It is not with a sill —

Nor Rafter -

Although I can trace a few interesting facts, including one possible reference to the bank founded by Henry Hope — Hope & Co — these references can only tell me that Dickinson might been thinking about money and real estate. Perhaps household accounts. Later in the fragment the language of litigation appears with the mention of ‘superficies’, a legal term for the right to build on someone else’s land, a property right. But ‘superficies’ also means ‘surface’ or ‘face’ or ‘aspect’. ‘Sill’ is a kind of surface-area, perhaps one whose extent is measured because it is narrow, particularly if we are thinking through spatial figures, as we often are with Dickinson. She is known for her geometric figures, her reference to ‘circumference’, which seems to suggest an ever expansive inner world, a world generated by metaphor.

Later in the poem the word ‘ledge’ appears which is another kind of thin surface. Ledge may also infer ‘ledger’ which is a book containing accounts. One reading implies another, but the word ‘ledge’ drops the ‘r’. Ledger remains but a linguistic ghost tracing another invisible thread of meaning: money, sums, maths, and then the final word of the fragement, ‘Laws,’ which takes us back to the figure of the lawyer and his understanding of ‘superficies’ or property rights — the right to take over someone else’s property and land — the right to claim someone else’s surfaces. Dickinson’s father was a trained lawyer and and no doubt she understood the logic of syllogism, the three part form of reasoning that induces a conclusion from two assumed propositions, in which both terms share a common term. House is perhaps the common term in this fragment poem but where it leads — either to property rights, or to a higher, more sacred law, suggested by the words 'supreme’ and pinnacle; some upward-directed, invisible space beyond the rafters — is anyone’s guess. All I can sense is the poet’s desire to leave behind some sense of mystery, an unfinished sum of parts; an open-ended process of gathering meaning. This, then, is a building project that can never be finished or foreclosed by self-righteous pedantry; and so Hope — or you might say poetry — continues to build his/her House.

The way Hope builds his House
It is not with a sill –
Nor Rafter – has that Edifice
But only Pinnacle –

Abode in as supreme
This superficies
As if it were of Ledges smit
Or mortised with the Laws –

I should also note that this particular transcription misses out words that this reader (perhaps) can’t make head nor tail of; thus we omit what obstructs our need for order and clarity. What we call meaning.

‘To see how Emily Dickinson originally wrote in pencil on the back of the envelope addressed to; “Mrs. Edward Dickinson & Family” click here: The way Hope builds his House | I’m Nobody! Who are you? The Life and Poetry of Emily Dickinson | The Morgan Library & Museum Online Exhibitions)