In college, I had a very difficult time understanding the idea of poetic meter. I understood that theoretically you could hold a hand under your chin and feel the drop of your jaw for each syllable, but it didn’t feel that simple to me. In the world that I had grown up in (a house in Texas with two parents from Alabama), a word like “what” could have one syllable, but it could also have two. A whole sentence like “do you want to go?” (five syllables) could be said “yannago?” (two syllables).
I found this almost as frustrating as trying to understand slant rhymes. In my brain, the words “pin” and “pen” sound the exact same. I cannot hear the difference because I didn’t grow up with one. So to me, a word like tin rhymes with both “pin” and “pen.” When we studied Emily Dickinson in my freshman year literature class, I remember asking if the same could be true for her. Could some of the rhymes that are considered slant rhymes or near rhymes by scholars have been regular rhymes inside her own head?
Here’s an example. In Dickinson’s poem “#340,” the first stanza reads:
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading – treading – till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through –
Emily Dickinson #340
If you read this poem in a kind of neutral American accent “fro” and “through” do not rhyme. But if you read it in a Boston accent, they rhyme perfectly. Emily Dickinson was from Western Massachusetts. Did she have an accent that affected her word choice?
I still think this is a valid question, but I did not do a very good job of articulating what I was trying to say to my college class, so my question was ignored. However, now I am an adult who owns a blog and has the guts to email a bunch of Emily Dickinson scholars and ask them the question no one but me is dying to know the answer to: Did Emily Dickinson have a Boston accent? I emailed five of these scholars across the country, and three of them got back to me, willing to entertain my silly little exercise.