Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [224]
114 ‘Snarl in the Brain’: ED to Loo (c. late May 1863). L281.
114 ‘Existence’: J443, op cit.
114 DNA as tragedy: I owe this to Laura Sims, University of Oxford, when we discussed biography across the table at the Helen Gardner Feast, St Hilda’s College (9 Feb 2007).
114 ‘My loss . . .’: Final stanza of ‘My first well Day—since many ill—’ (c. spring 1863, copied in booklet 28). J574/Fr288. Earlier (Nov 1862) ED sent a version of the quoted single stanza to SB (at the time of his return from his convalescent journey to Europe). L275. The Bowles version disguises the personal source (‘My’) in ‘you’, as though speaking for a sick Bowles. Seth Archer quotes the same stanza in his 2009 article on panic attacks, noting that ‘anxiety, panic, and mental anguish somehow brought her closer to this beloved sense of immortality’.
114 ‘As One does Sickness over’: J957/Fr917.
115 ‘A Clock stopped’: (c. late 1861). J287/Fr259.
115 ‘Agony’; ‘Convulsion’: ‘I like a look of Agony’. J241/Fr339.
115 ‘Transport’ taught ‘by throe’: ‘Water is taught by thirst’ (c. 1859). J135/Fr93.
115 ‘Spasmodic’; ‘uncontrolled’: L265.
115 Mark Bostridge on posthumous diagnoses: Florence Nightingale, 324.
115 ‘Dying!’: (c. spring 1861). J158/Fr222.
115 ‘some strange Race’: ‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’ (c. summer 1862). J280/Fr340.
116 ‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’; ‘dropped down’: Ibid. See Vendler, 73, on extinction of consciousness.
116 ‘Cleaving’: (c. early 1864). J937 and 992/Fr867. Sent to SHD, who was in the know. Vendler, 71. Habegger, 477, cites this poem as an example of ED’s poetic registration of ‘the fear that one may be coming apart’. He adds: ‘No other American writer of her time explored with equal sensitivity and mastery the experience of fragmentation.’
116 ‘off my head’: ‘If ever the lid gets off my head’ (c. summer 1863). J1727/Fr585.
116 ‘scalps’: ‘He fumbles at your soul’ (c. late 1862). J315/Fr477/EDC and ‘Nature—sometimes sears a Sapling—’ (c. late 1862). J314/Fr457.
116 ‘Nature—sometimes sears a Sapling—’: Ibid.
116 ‘Dread’: ‘I lived on Dread—’ (c. late 1862). J770/Fr498.
116 ‘to simulate is stinging work’: J443, op. cit.
116 ‘Presentiment’: ‘Presentiment—is that long shadow—on the Lawn—‘ (c. late 1862). J764/Fr841.
117 ‘Winds’; ‘Thunderbolt’; ‘Universe’: ‘He fumbles at your Soul’, op. cit. Cristanne Miller, Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar, 115, comments perceptively: ‘As a narrative event, the poem may reveal the speaker’s attempt to outlive an overwhelming experience by articulating it in a universalized verbal and pronominal form: this happens to “you,” not (just?) her. The present tense may imply that she continuously relives the sequence even while trying to distance herself from it by representing it as universal, or prophetic of someone else’s life.’
117 ‘electric gale’: ‘With Pinions of Disdain’ (c. 1877). J1431/Fr1448.
117 ‘by birth a Bachelor’: L204. Aged 28. Recent research on epilepsy by Dr Jane Mellanby in the Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, has found that epileptic monkeys are demoted in the social hierarchy and unlikely to mate.
117 ‘The Brain within its Groove’: (c. 1862). J556/Fr563. Deppman, 94-8.
117 ‘Murder by degrees’; ‘mashes . . .’: ‘The Whole of it came not at once—’ (c. late 1862). J762/Fr485. Similar to ‘stuns you by degrees’ in ‘He fumbles at your Soul’, op. cit.
117 ‘straighten’; ‘bubble Cool’: ‘He fumbles at your Soul’, op. cit.
117 ‘Assassin’; ‘borrows a Revolver’: ‘One need not be a Chamber—to be Haunted—’ (c. 1862). J670/Fr407. (This scene is from a version of c. early 1864, sent to Sue.) A line quoted above, at the close of ch. 4, ‘Ourself behind ourself, concealed’, is from this poem. The haunted house, the divided self, and the confrontation are uncannily like Henry James’s psychological ghost tale, ‘The Jolly Corner’, a story T. S. Eliot later related to his hero’s haunted self in The Family Reunion.
117 poems that recount the . . . stages: See Vendler, 67, on the and thens of a torturer