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 Girls referred to in it. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding. In a kind of mind-bending recursivity, the existence of the poem validates it.

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 those that achieve her level of literary fame. 

This achievement is made even more remarkable in the sense in which this poem 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 and 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 it seems to be a fragment, but we don’t know. 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? 

I think there are hundreds of Dickinson lines that are good enough that they would be remembered even as fragments. Dickinson shares this in common with another's of Fame's Girls, Sappho. Sappho's poetry had such a golden aura that even the few fragments we have of it are redolent of the eternal. 

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.

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