Window Treatment
I first learned of George Monteiro this past March from his daughter. Monteiro was a professor emeritus of English and of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at Brown University, the author or editor of many books, and one of the founders of the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst. I wrote about him HERE and HERE.
On my recent trip out to LA, I had a chance to read a portion of Monteiro’s 1998 book “Robert Frost and the New England Renaissance” on my flight out west – specifically the two chapters on Dickinson’s influence on Frost.
The second chapter of the book, “Dangling Conversation,” derives its title from a song by Simon and Garfunkel called “The Dangling Conversation”; here are some of the lyrics:
And we sit and drink our coffee Couched in our indifference, like shells upon the shore You can hear the ocean roar In the dangling conversation And the superficial sighs The borders of our lives And you read your Emily Dickinson And I my Robert Frost And we note our place with book markers That measure what we've lost Like a poem poorly written We are verses out of rhythm Couplets out of rhyme In syncopated time
You can listen to the song HERE.
The chapter opens with this quote from Frank Prentice Rand’s 1969 book “The Jones Library in Amherst, 1919 - 1969”:
“The two Dickinson rooms on the third floor of the Library are a minor Mecca for both researchers and pilgrims. The Library’s crown of glory, however, are the Robert Frost rooms.
Monteiro’s text then begins with this:
“The Frost rooms in the Jones Library are high-ceilinged, fenestrated on three sides, spacious, and simple. The library’s Dickinson rooms are spare, small, low-ceilinged, and spottily fenestrated. That Frost inherited the better quarters can be attributed largely, of course, to his having been a living presence when the decisions to create and to find quarters for a Frost Collection were made. By the time arrangements were made for the Emily Dickinson Collection, the poet’s fortunes were in the hands of a proud niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, and a few well-meaning but disorganized strangers, who were no match for the living poet managing his own public relations.”
The first thing that jumped out at me was that word “fenestrated,” not a term you hear often. “Fenestrated” is just a fancy way to say “furnished with windows.” The OED shows the word’s etymology as “a borrowing from Latin. Etymon: “feerstrātus.” The word is also related to the German word for window, “fenster” (LOL – can you tell I took German in high school).
I looked up “fenestrate” and “fenestrated” on the online Dickinson lexicon, and the words were not there. She never used either in any of her poems; however, she did use “window.” I searched “window” on the Dickson archive, and found 64 entries representing 21 different poems; I added an “s” for “windows” and 35 more entries popped up representing 11 other poems. I realized that I had to search for “windows” separately when the poem “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died” was not among those listed for the word “window” – though the poem ends (rather famously) with these lines (I added the caps):
“With Blue - uncertain - stumbling Buzz / Between the light - and me / And then the WINDOWS failed - and then / I could not see to see”
Below: Dickinson's poems with "window" and with "windows":
I was surprised to find that “fenestrate” and “fenestrated” were not old as I would have thought – in the sense that the OED lists the earliest known use of both (in published texts) from the early 1800s. Additionally, I found this example of usage, from J. Weale’s “Rudimentary Dictionary of Terms of Architecture” (1849) to be chucklesome:
“Astylar and fenestrated ought..to be merely convertible terms; but as they are not.”
I’ve always thought the same; you? Why, I can remember years ago when I first met my wife and took her on a romantic dinner date, and there in the candlelight I whispered, “Astylar and fenestrated ought to be convertible terms, but they’re not.” Okay, I’m being silly! Time to move on – and I’ll have more from Monteiro’s book tomorrow. For now, I’ll leave you with one of Dickinson’s well-known “windows” poems -- along with alternate word choices she considered:
