Calm down, Derb. Take a deep breath, finish that glass of wine, and just tell the story.

OK, this is Tuesday evening, and I just got through homework duty. My daughter, age 14, has been given a poem to study. It’s Emily Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for Death.” I like Emily Dickinson’s stuff, and know this poem.

Well, the school had printed it up on a sheet for the kids to study, with a nice picture of a horse-drawn carriage heading into the darkness as illustration. A nice bit of work… except…

Looking at the sheet, I saw something amiss. I pulled down Matthiessen’s 1950 Oxford Book of American Verse, which I have come to trust as authoritative.

(Do NOT depend on the internet for stuff like this. Books published after the collapse of editing skills around 1980 should also be taken with a grain of salt. The other day I took delivery of a copy of Jacques Chailley’s The Magic Flute–Masonic Opera from a 2nd-hand book website. I was thrilled to see that it contained an erratum slip. You don’t see those much any more! The book is dated 1971.)

OK, Miss Dickinson’s poem, third stanza:

“We passed the school where children played

At wrestling in a ring;”

Nellie’s sheet had: “At recess, in a ring.”

Fourth stanza:

“We passed before a house that seemed

A swelling of the ground;

The roof was scarcely visible,

The cornice but a mound.”

Nellie’s sheet had the last line as: “The cornice in the ground.”

I guess some present-day Tom Bowdler decided that a reference to children wrestling was just too ickily masculine for today’s teens to tolerate.

As for the substitution of “in the ground” for “but a mound,” I’m baffled. Does “mound” make it too obvious she’s talking about her grave? (Then why give the kids a poem about death in the first place?) Did dirty-minded Tom think it might be taken to refer to (or actually does refer to!) the mons veneris? Does he think that perhaps “mound” would confuse the kids because they only know this word in relation to candy bars? Or what?

In any case, the impression left on the mind of a 14-year-old by Tom’s alterations is: “Rhyming ‘ground’ with ‘ground’? This is supposed to be a major American poet, and that’s the best she can do for a rhyme? Feugh.”

Poor Emily is of course spinning in her… place of rest.