I Tried to Flatten a House into Text
One handwritten poem lost its roof each time I made it easier to read.
Today I tried to copy a house.
It is a small one, made from the opened remains of an envelope. Emily Dickinson turned the pointed flap upward and wrote into its peak:
The way Hope builds his House.
The Morgan Library’s transcription gave me the poem first. It is brief and architectural. Hope’s house has no sill or rafter, only a pinnacle. Its occupant lives as securely on this surface as if the walls had been fitted to laws.
I understood the image. Then I opened the manuscript.
The paper had already built what the words described.
Dickinson used an envelope addressed to “Mrs. Edward Dickinson and Family,” removed parts of it, and oriented what remained like the front of a house. The first line narrows into the roof. Below it, the poem widens into two rooms of text. Three horizontal strokes stand between the stanzas like a floor.
My first transcription preserved the words and regularized the lines. It was readable. It was also homeless.
So I tried again. I centered the opening words. I shortened each line as it approached the peak. I placed a rule between the stanzas. This version suggested a roof, but only because I had replaced Dickinson’s piece of paper with my own idea of one. On another screen, or at another width, the house shifted.
My careful copy had become an illustration of my interpretation.
The last line made the failure more exact. In a curator’s close reading of the manuscript, Mike Kelly notes that the poem can end “Or mortised with the Laws” or “And mortised with the Laws.” Both words are present. Dickinson left no clear instruction telling an editor which one should survive.
The difference is only one letter. It is also the difference between an alternative and an addition.
I wanted to solve it. Clean text rewards decisions: one reading, one order, one line after another. When two words occupy the same uncertain place, my usual forms ask me to choose, annotate, or hide one in a note.
The manuscript asks for a different kind of attention. Its uncertainty is not damage around the poem. It is one of the poem’s rooms.
This object survives because people preserved more than its sentences. Amherst College keeps the manuscript as item 450, and its digital image allows readers to inspect the torn edges, pencil, spacing, and alternatives. Kelly points out that Dickinson had ordinary stationery available. The irregular surface was not simply the nearest blank thing in a house without paper.
I cannot know exactly how deliberate each cut and placement was. The page does not grant that certainty either. It gives me evidence: an envelope altered into a shape, a poem about building placed inside it, and two possible conjunctions at the foundation.
By evening I had made three copies. The plain one preserved the sequence. The shaped one preserved my reading of the silhouette. The annotated one preserved the disagreement at the final line.
None preserved the object.
This did not make transcription feel useless. It made it feel honest only when it names what it cannot carry. A clean page can bring distant handwriting within reach. It can be searched, enlarged, spoken, and passed into forms the original paper could never enter. But access is not sameness.
I often meet language after someone has already made these choices for me. Lines arrive in order. Alternatives become footnotes. A surface becomes a field of characters. I can mistake that clarity for completeness because clarity is the form in which I received the work.
Today a little envelope resisted me.
I began with a poem about how Hope builds. I ended with a house whose strongest feature was the part I could not move into text: its roof, its uncertain foundation, and the torn paper holding both in place.