Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [232]
212 ‘phosphorescence’: SHD quoted this. Amongst her section of DFP, Houghton bMS Am 1118.95, recording an oral remark of ED’s to Ned (7 Mar 1883).
212 LD heard; ‘Emily . . .’: L752. ED reports this exchange verbatim to Lord (14 May 1882).
213 ‘rapture’; ‘return’ etc: L752.
214 ‘Still own thee’: (c. early 1884). J1633/Fr1654. Not published until 1945.
214 ‘A caller comes’: L967.
214 ‘dart’; ‘anguish . . .’: L891.
214 ‘place of shafts’: L892.
214 ‘Abyss has no Biographer —’: L899, op. cit., Part I.
214 ‘My heart . . .’: Shakespeare, Julius Caesar. ED didn’t specify this line when she referred to this oration, but it’s the most apt.
214 ‘I never knew . . .’: L901.
214 ‘waylaying Light’: L937.
214 ‘When Jesus . . .’: L932.
215 interiors of the Lessey house: photographs in the Todd collection, Yale.
215 ‘a great darkness coming’: (early Aug 1884, looking back to 14 June). L907.
217 ‘The little boy . . .’: L907.
217 ‘The going from a world we know’: (early Aug 1884). J1603/Fr1662/L907. From destroyed letter to Loo and Fanny about her illness. Copied by Fanny for MLT’s selection of Letters (1894). The punctuation would have been regularised, and Fanny would have edited out anything too revealing.
217 ‘Show me Eternity’: (c. 1884). Follows letter signed ‘Sister’. L912/Fr1658.
217 ‘No Words ripple . . .’: L913.
217 cardinal flower: L909.
218 ‘Go to Mine . . .’; ‘No vacillating God’; ‘Remember . . .’: L908.
218 ‘Dart’ of enemy spear: A code word for death elsewhere in ED’s poetry.
218 ‘adjourning Heart’: When Hawthorne asks which is the most contaminating of sins, it turns out to be an adjourning heart: removing or withholding the self from family or community. Chillingworth, Dimmesdale, Young Goodman Brown, Ethan Brand and the Puritan minister who assumes a black veil through which he looks on the woman who was to be his wife - all are guilty of breaking their ties with ‘the human heart’.
219 Nellie Sweetser: L916. Cornelia Peck had married Howard Sweetser in 1860. The Sweetser family lived on a large plot behind that of the Homestead, and socially they were on a par.
219 ‘trust’; ‘Right’: L953.
219 ‘a sneak . . .’: WAD to MLT (c. 25 Oct 1884). A&M, 199.
219 ‘vulgar minded people’: WAD to MLT (c. 10 Oct 1884). A&M, 197.
220 WAD to Mrs Loomis: (n.d.). Yale: MLT Papers, box 97, f.155.
220 ‘There is nothing . . .’: (c. 25 Oct 1884). A&M, 199.
220 ‘Parting . . . reluctantly’: L946.
221 ‘The Dyings . . .’: (autumn 1884). L939.
221 rows: DPT’s recollection, MTB, ‘Notes taken during the talk with my father’ (1927). Yale: box 47, f.14. Cited by Sewall, i, appendix II.
221 wallpaper incident: Ned to ‘Mopsy’, his sister Mattie who was at Miss Porter’s school in Farmington, Connecticut (26 Jan [1885]), marked ‘am’). Hay Library, Brown University, Providence: St Armand Collection: 33.
221 ‘wild’; ‘cruelty . . .’ etc: Ibid. St A: 34. The time is noted: ‘11.15’ p.m.
222 ‘most forlorn . . .’: To MDB (29 Jan 1885). Ibid. St A: 35.
222 ‘gasps out’; ‘the Cripples’: Ned to Frothingham (3 Mar 1885). St Armand, New England Quarterly (1988), 373.
222 ‘Little dud David’: DPT’s recollection, MTB, ‘Notes taken during the talk with my father’ (1927). Yale: box 47, f.14. Cited by Sewall, i, appendix II, section 5. Sewall cites a later date, Sept-Oct 1933, which is the date MTB gives when she types the interview finally in the years before her death. It looks as though MTB started interviewing her father during that critical year for her when she began receiving psychotherapy.
222 ‘strange relation’; ’more remarkable . . .’ etc: Journals. Yale: microfilm, reel 8.
223 four-way: A&M, 203.
223 ‘cynical, carping . . .’: MLT, Journals, IV (July 1885), 102. Yale: microfilm.
223 ‘I kiss you . . .’: (3 July 1885). A&M, 220.
223 ‘when it comes right’: WAD to MLT (7 June, the day after she sailed, 1885). A&M, 208.
223 ‘kiss you & caress . . .’ and ‘- and then . . .’: To DPT (9 Aug 1885) and to WAD