Fame's Boys and Girls, who never die

Fame's Boys and Girls, who never die
And are too seldom born—


    -Fr892, J1066, 1865


The amazing thing about this poem is that Emily herself could be one of the children of fame it refers to. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding. In a kind of mind-bending recursivity, the poem validates itself by still existing.

In the inscrutable mystery of her poems, in their Truth and Beauty, Dickinson, miraculously, seems to still be alive. And it's true that "seldom born" are the poets that have achieved her level of literary fame. 

The achievement of this poem is made even more remarkable in the sense in which it seems to know its own fate. It doesn’t surprise me that Dickinson knew this about herself, but it’s still uncanny. It’s like Babe Ruth pointing to the bleachers in the fifth inning of Game 3 of the 1932 World Series  before hitting the game winning home run to deep center field.

“Called Shot” by Robert Thom

Another intriguing thing about this poem is that we don't know if it is complete, or unfinished. Thomas Johnson describes it as being a ‘pencilled scrap, a jotting perhaps intended for future use.’ Was it? Or is it complete as is? What do you think? 

There are hundreds of Dickinson lines that would be remembered even if they just came down to us as fragments. Dickinson shares this in common with another of Fame's Girls, Sappho. Sappho's poetry has such an aura to it that the few fragments of it we have feel eternal. 

If it is a fragment, just a beginning, we are left are to wonder what's next.

I found an article online by David Lehman in which he talks about a poetry contest in which poets were asked to use these lines as the first two of a quatrain. Lehman writes,

"While this poem can be read as a complete work, the poet Mitch Sisskind acted on the assumption that it represents the beginning of a poem that Dickinson intended to finish but never did. When The Best American Poetry blog ran an “Emily Starts, You Finish” contest in 2008, Sisskind added these two lines:

Their epitaphs—memorialized—
Cut in water—frozen in stone."

That's a great image, Mitch Sisskind. Anybody else want to give it a try? (minus any help from AI, please.)

Here’s my try,

Fame's Boys and Girls, who never die
And are too seldom born—

Still can’t do what you can do
within some cloud of form.

Okay, now you.

      -/)dam l)eGraff

P.S. All that said about Emily's future fame, my best guess is that this poem was written to Sue and is a declaration of "eternal love" and an acknowledgment of its rareness. I get this idea, in part, because of the poem following this one in the Franklin order. See the next poem.