He fumbles at your soul
Emily Dickinson
He fumbles at your soul As players at the keys Before they drop full music on; He stuns you by degrees, Prepares your brittle substance For the ethereal blow, By fainter hammers, further heard, Then nearer, then so slow Your breath has time to straighten, Your brain to bubble cool,— Deals one imperial thunderbolt That scalps your naked soul.
Of note
When Mabel Loomis Todd first printed this poem in 1896, she titled it "The Master" and changed the opening to "He fumbles at your spirit." Dickinson's own copy, signed "Emily," begins with "Soul." Todd's version saves that word for the last line.
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TEXT PROVENANCE · First published 1896 in Poems by Emily Dickinson: Third Series · Text from Poems by Emily Dickinson: Third Series (1896), p. 86, with the first line’s “soul” as in both of Dickinson’s manuscripts (about 1862; Johnson 315, Franklin 477), where the 1896 editor printed “spirit”. Like the 1896 text, it leaves out the manuscripts’ last two lines.
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