"I, grown shrewder-scan the skies": Reading Emily Dickinson's Fascicle 33 as a Planetary System

How to read Emily Dickinson's forty sewn booklets ("fascicles") remains an open and contentious question for scholars, all the more relevant now with the publication of the first reading edition organized by sheet and fascicle, Emily Dickinson's Poems: As She Preserved Them (2016, ed. ). Perhaps appreciating the aesthetic unity of the fascicles requires a new notion of aesthetic organization: conceiving of them as systems rather than sequences. This notion was proposed by M.L. Rosenthal and Sally Gall in an early study of the fascicles, which suggests that poetic sequences function like planetary systems in which various thematic and formal continuities develop recursively and simultaneously, rather than along a linear arrow of time. This essay develops the planetary system analogy into a mode of non-sequential, systemic reading, and applies this hermeneutic to Fascicle 33 as a model for elucidating other fascicles. Visualizing Fascicle 33 as a system reveals significant formal and thematic connections, anchored to a recursive meditation on the romantic trope of addressing a distant lover.