Differences between Virginia's transcription and published version.
Virginia Lucas’s transcription of Felicia Dorothea Hemans’ poem, The Rock Beside the Sea, varies from its ‘original’ counterpart. Diction, spacing, capitalization, and differing punctuation marks are the components that makes Lucas’s hand-written copy of Hemans’ poem unalike.
The title of the poem in Lucas’ scrapbook is underlined twice, whereas the original copy isn’t underlined. The reason for Lucas’ intention in a double underlining is currently ambiguous, but might have something to do with the meaning of the poem to the transcriptionist.
Lucas utilized quotation marks at the beginning and end of the poem. Quotations are not utilized in the original poem. She also places commas, periods, and semi-colons in differing places throughout the poem.
Spacing is interesting and challenging to evaluate in a handwritten copy of a poem. For example, it looks like the exclamation mark in the beginning of the poem after the word, “Oh,” is right after the word. In the original poem, there is a space for a character between the word and the use of the exclamation point. The same distinction occurs in the use of the semi-colon throughout the poem. There is a space between the word and a semi-colon in the original poem, whereas there is no distinction of the importance of spacing in Lucas’s copy.
Two words, “Spring” and “Than” are not capitalized in the transcription whereas the original poem capitalizes these two words.
The most fascinating differences between the original and the transcribed poem is the replacing of the word, “curlew” and “watching.” Lucas places the word, “sea bird” in place of curlew. The difference in the two words aren’t really significant. Curlew is a specific type of sea bird. The most intriguing change in the poem is from the word, “watching” to “heating.” “Watching” heart is nice, but, “heating” heart signifies passion and could have a much deeper and more impactful meaning to the poem.
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