A bird came down the walk

Emily Dickinson published almost nothing in her lifetime and left nearly 1,800 poems in manuscript. The poem appeared in Poems in 1890, edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who smoothed her punctuation and added titles. Later editions restored her own dashes and capitals. Project Gutenberg carries the 1890 collection.

Where this text comes fromWhat you are copying is not quite what Dickinson wrote. She punctuated with dashes and capitalized unpredictably, and the 1890 edition that first carried this poem into print smoothed both, replacing dashes with conventional marks and giving poems titles she never used. Her editors thought they were making her readable. Later editors went back to the manuscripts and undid most of it, so this text is a historical artefact: the version that made her famous, rather than the version she made.

What you might not noticeThe poem’s most quoted line describes the bird eating an angle-worm raw, and the hyphenated compound is the form the 1890 editors printed. The word is now usually written as one. Source

What it trainsEighteen capital letters in 452 characters and only three of them open a sentence, because the editors kept enough of Dickinson’s capitalization to leave it unpredictable while removing enough to leave no pattern either. That combination is the hardest kind for a typist: not a rule, not chaos, just enough irregularity to stop the hand settling. Six commas, three semicolons, three hyphens and a colon share the rest of the work. Three words reach ten letters and none goes past it: frightened, convenient and the compound angle-worm, which is the only one of the three carrying a mark inside it.

Read the full text at the publisher: Project Gutenberg