That last scrap from Coleridge’s Rime reminds me of a ques­tion I’ve been won­der­ing about ever since we put together the Bar­bara Guest issue for Chicago Review.

In “Nebraska,” Guest uses the word eft­soon­ing in the first stanza:

Cli­mate suc­cumb­ing con­tin­u­ously as water gath­ered
into foam or Nebraska ele­vated by ships
with­holds what is glo­ri­ous in its climb like
a waiter bal­anc­ing a water­glass while the tray
slips that was neck­lace in the arch of bridge
now the island set­tles linear its para­graph of tree
vibrates the nat­ural cymbal with its other tongue
strikes an atti­tude we have drawn there on the limb
when icicle against the sail will darken the wind
eft­soon­ing it and the ways lap with spices as
buoy­ancy once the gal­lop­ing area where grain
is rinsed and care requires we choose our walk

My first thought was that the word was a double typo for fes­toon­ing, which would cer­tainly fit the sense of Guest’s poem. But if it was a typo, it wasn’t caught when Guest’s Selected Poems reprinted “Nebraska” (which orig­i­nally appeared in Moscow Man­sions). Obvi­ously that’s not dis­pos­i­tive evi­dence, but it did give me pause. When I asked a person whose judg­ment I trusted what we ought to do with the word, he responded, “I think the word is charm­ing and ought be let stand.” I agreed then and agree now with both halves of that sen­tence, and so let it stand is what we did.

But the ques­tion remains: what in the world did Guest mean?

The OED includes sev­eral def­i­n­i­tions for the adverb eft­soons, the third of which is clearly the one Coleridge wanted–

1. A second time, again.

b. quasi-​adj. with vbl. n.

2. Indi­cat­ing sequence or tran­si­tion in dis­course: Again, more­over, likewise.

3. After­wards, soon after­wards. (The notion of ‘soon’, though app. implied in the ety­mol­ogy, is not dis­tinctly evi­denced in early exam­ples, and down to 17th c. is some­times absent; but in mod. archais­tic use the sense is com­monly ‘forth­with, immediately’.)

4. From time to time, occa­sion­ally, repeatedly.

5. eft­soons as: as soon as.

There’s noth­ing for a verbal form. We can try to extrap­o­late a verb–againing?–but even if we accept the sense of that word, how would it pos­si­bly make sense in Guest’s poem?

I’m clearly not the first person to wonder about this. Phillip Good and Bernadette Mayer included the word in “Skylands” in obvi­ous homage to Guest, and the way they use it sug­gests they favor the typo reading:

Living in a black shoe made by cold fish where one person’s
parent died cause of lack of giant spider
   in the heat­ing system
Eft­soon­ing Moscow man­sions with ghoul­ish joy­ness, Hawks
are large, man! You should see them they’re archaic!

The typo expla­na­tion still seems the most likely to me, but I’m curi­ous if anyone has other ideas.