The Saddest Noise

[RSherman]

6. 1764

I had the same thought. I copied the poem from a website. Could it be a number assigned to the poem? I googled and found the following:

"Emily Dickinson did not number her poems. She didn’t give them titles.

My college anthology of American literature (1978) presented her work using Thomas H. Johnson’s numbering notations in his 1955 edition, The Poems of Emily Dickinson. He used a J. plus a number.

The Academy of American Poets uses the first line and a number for the Dickinson poem mentioned in Somewhere Among; “There is a certain slant of light” # 258. The Poetry Foundation uses the first line as a title and (320). Other anthologies use combinations or variations of the title, number and J. "