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Dickinson's DONT PUT UP MY THREAD & NEEDLE.(Emily Dickinson)(punning of sow and sew and sexual division of labor)(Critical Essay)

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From: The Explicator
Date: 19940622
Author:BODE, RITA

In his three-volume, 1955 edition of Emily Dickinson's poems, Thomas H. Johnson concludes that in poem 617, "Dont put up my Thread & Needle," "the spelling of 'sow' and 'sowing' (lines 2 and 17) is undoubtedly a mistake for 'sewing"' (475). Since then, critics have credited Dickinson with an intentional pun if (as Cynthia Griffin Wolff points out) for no other reason than to make sense of the "furrow" in line 13: "Leave my Needle in the furrow" (208). Dickinson's verbal play here, however, is extensive. Her punning inscribes one poem within another.

In nineteenth-century ...

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