Thematic stanza for E. Dickinson's verse

"The Lonely House" does assure that Emily Dickinson was not stereotyped in her written composition (Life, poem XV):
I know some lonely houses off the road
A robber ’d like the look of, —
Wooden barred,
And windows hanging low,
Inviting to
A portico…

"The Library" yet would show an unfinished stanza shape, in handwritten as well as printed copies. Emily Dickinson’s health condition before death did not let her even title all her poems.
… The gown that Dante deified.
Facts, centuries before,
{stanza break}
He traverses familiar,
As one should come to town…

Stanzas need to be integral bodies of word sense. The Wind encourages a consideration of the stanza as a thematic structure.
Of all the sounds despatched abroad,
There’s not a charge to me
Like that old measure in the boughs,
That phraseless melody
The wind does, working like a hand
Whose fingers brush the sky,
Then quiver down, with tufts of tune
Permitted gods and me.
{stanza break}
When winds go round and round in bands,
And thrum upon the door,
And birds take places overhead,
To bear them orchestra;

The first print uses the comma here. At stanza end, the comma may yet give the impression something is interrupted, fragmented. The semicolon works better in delineating on thematically self-contained structures, and the first print embraces the use, see The Heart Asks Pleasure First, In a Library, or Whether My Bark Went Down at Sea.

The comma may set forth semantic elements that continue to expand. Let us recur to the "Success".
Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne’er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.
Not one of all the purple host
Who took the flag to-day
Can tell the definition,
So clear, of victory,
As he, defeated, dying,
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Break, agonized and clear.

The verse brings a picture of enemy brief and transient victory. To resolve in favor of a unitary layout, I could follow Houghton print image 72S-700. Thomas Niles, the publisher, reportedly admitted in his letter to Emily Dickinson, “you have doubtless perceived [it] was slightly changed in phraseology”. The problem was not so much in the layout, though the poem became divided into stanzas for the first print.

The final verses as in the Masque of Poets would have success defined by a person to experience failure: the enemy takes the flag and the lead character dies hearing shouts of exultation, the distant strains of triumph break, agonizing clear.

Opposite semantics yet never become misnomers in Emily Dickinson’s verses. The first print has the lead character lose the flag, but it is not far away he can hear the enemy defeated:
The distant strains of triumph
Break, agonized and clear (Higginson-Todd).

It was the sake of thematic integrity to make me present the Psalm of the Day as a layout of 4×3 – 6 – 3×3 – 6 lines, whereas the notion of a thematically self-contained structure encouraged the presentation of the Summer’s Armies as 6 – 6×3 lines of text.

Regard to thematic delineation influenced me into shaping the text as two stanzas, for the Transplanted and Death and Life. The train of thought required to join the verses into unitary layouts for the Dawn, Perhaps You’d Like to Buy a Flower, A Train Went through a Burial Gate, and The Bustle in a House.

Word sense indicated to think over the comma for Rouge et Noir, A Service of Song, Love’s Baptism, One Dignity, and The Funeral. The semicolon rather than the comma closes the first stanza in The Grass; the semicolon remains for the fourth, owing to the phrasal development:
And even when it dies, to pass
In odors so divine,
As lowly spices gone to sleep,
Or amulets of pine;
{stanza break}
And then to dwell in sovereign barns…

In "The Outlet", I leave the comma and dash combination:
I’ll fetch thee brooks
From spotted nooks, —
Say, sea, take me!
The comma and dash are to mark a phrasal antecedent or, in simpler words, it is before the comma and dash we tell the grounds or cause, and we offer a consequent or response after. The dash alone expands on thought.

The semicolon holds for the third and fifth stanzas in the Indian Summer, and for the second thematic stanza in the Emancipation. The dot can mark an inner boundary for a train of thought, as it does in the first stanza of Along the Potomac.

I have arranged the stanzas thematically for the "Library, In Vain, Resurrection, The Wife, Apotheosis, May-Flower" — feel welcome to my Resource for Emily Dickinson’s poetry at my site, teresapelka.com. I have offered the content to the public domain.

https://archive.org/details/EMILYDICKINSONFIRSTSERIES