Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [216]
7 ‘yellow eye’: ‘My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—’, op. cit.
7 ‘buckled lips’: ‘The reticent volcano’ (n.d.). J1748/ Fr1776. Transcribed by MLT and published in 1896.
7 ‘Abyss has no biographer—’: L899. Vendler, 71, associates abyss with the ‘fissure’ and ‘rupture’ of life’s ‘serial plot’. This appears an internal paradigm of the family plot disrupted by a feud.
7 ‘I’m Nobody!’: (c. late 1861). J288/Fr260.
7 ‘Wife—without the Sign!’: ‘Title divine—is mine!’ (c. 1861). J1072/Fr194.
8 ‘I tie my Hat’: (c. spring 1863). The poem is transcribed here from MB 553-5, the manuscript source for J443. (The transcription in Fr522 eliminates the penultimate stanza, which is relevant to the counter-domestic point of the poem.)
8 ‘eyes were full of . . .’: The Mill on the Floss (1860), book II, ch. 5.
9 ‘What have I done?’: ‘Millicent’s Life’, vol. iii (24 Sept 1881). Yale: box 116, f.454. Also, MLT’s Journals (24 Sept 1881). Yale: microfilm.
10 donor: James B. Germaine of Albany. MTB, TS notes for a talk with her father, 1967. Yale: box 47, f.14. Germaine left his money elsewhere.
10 card-dropping etiquette: Unfinished TS autobiography. Yale.
10 Mrs Stearns: MS memorial tribute (n.d.). Yale: box 78, f.315.
10 MLT’s hair: a lock in Yale collection.
11 thinnest white dress: MLT Journals. Yale: microfilm, reel 8.
11 ‘Exultation is the going’: pencil fair copy, addressed ‘Sue’ (c. early 1860). J76/ Fr143.
11 ‘Her talk . . .’; ‘quick . . .’; ‘seizes . . .’: From SHD’s obituary for ED in the Springfield Republican (May 1886). The tense of the verbs is changed from past to present.
11 MLT on Schubert: Yale: box 77, f.310. (37 MS pages.)
12 Emma offering scalloped oysters: Austen, Emma (1815).
12 WAD ‘delicate’: MLT, Journals, III, 185 (10 Nov 1882). Yale: microfilm.
12 ‘on the heights’: MLT, Journals, V (1886): a retrospect. Yale: microfilm.
12 MLT’s voice rang out; ‘Miss Emily’: MLT, Journals, III, 174 (15 Sept 1882). Yale: microfilm, reel 8.
13 ‘endure’: ‘Elysium is as far as to’. J1760/Fr1590. MLT had the impression that this poem was composed during her visit, c. 1882.
13 Austin’s diary: Yale.
14 ‘always watching’: Home, 413.
14 ‘She writes the strangest poems’: MLT, Journals, III, 174. Yale: microfilm.
15 ‘we all love you’: L311.
16 ‘sew alone’: L310.
16 ‘at the White Heat’: (c. 1862). J365/Fr401. One of three copies was sent to TWH.
16 ‘torrid spirit’; ‘Domingo’: L855. Domingo was associated with the production of rum and with its power to intoxicate.
16 books with ‘more’: The Mill on the Floss, book IV, ch. 3.
16 ‘still—Volcano—Life’: (c. spring 1863). J601/Fr517.
17 control: Juhasz, The Undiscovered Continent, 172-3.
17 ‘Fire rocks’: ‘On my volcano grows the Grass’. J1677/Fr1743. Transcribed by SHD.
17 ‘Will my great Sister . . .’: (c. 1883). L854.
17 ‘Your little mental gallantries . . .’: (c. 1883). L856.
II: ‘A STILL—VOLCANO—LIFE’
1: THE FIRST FAMILY
21 ‘pure and terrible’: (July 1874). L418. After her father’s death.
21 ‘I do not expect . . . pleasure’: Sewall, i, 47.
21 LD mimicked father: MLT’s notes of LD’s anecdotes. Yale: box 82, f.402.
21 ‘saw things . . . just as they were’: WAD, recollections of ED. Yale. Sewall, i, 222-3.
21 ‘startling’: LD to ED’s editor, Niles (3 Apr 1893). AC.
21 ‘the Soul’s Superior instants’: (c. 1863). J306/Fr630.
21 ‘simulate’: J443/Fr522.
22 ‘a sweet little song’: L7.
22 ‘Kangaroo’: L268. See the vivid poem ‘Kangaroo’, by D. H. Lawrence.
22 freckles: ED mentioned them to Mrs Bowles (c. Aug 1861), L235. She also mentions ‘my freckled bosom’ in ‘Rearrange a “Wife’s” Affections’, though in a poem it could be invention. In her youth the scoop-necked dresses of the 1840s would have exposed her chest to the sun