A 820: etext transcription

Physical Description
- Manuscript: A 820
- Date: [about 1885 (THJ)]
- Status: text 1: message-fragment, remains; text 2: fragment, extrageneric
- Formula: 1 fragment
- Paper: wove, white stationery
- Dimensions: 100 x 41 mm; reverse: 41 x 100 mm
- Edges: top: torn; left: scissored; reverse: bottom: scissored; right: torn
- Folds: folded horizontally into uneven halves; reverse: folded vertically into uneven halves
- Media: pencil
- Hand: rough
Collection
- Amherst College Library
Transmission History
- MSS from LND to MLT, 1891?
Publication History
- A 820, text 1: unpublished? A 820, text 2: NEQ 28 (September 1955): 304; Letters (1958), L 976 n
Commentary
- This is one of a number of late manuscripts in which the opposite sides of the paper constitute separate textual spaces. A 820a carries the remains of an abandoned, and now partly illegible, message-draft. It may be the draft of a letter to George Montague, the fair-copy of which contains one or two similar phrases (see J L 703) to those in the fragment. The text inscribed on A 820, by itself a single, exquisite line of prose or verse, appears as a trace in three fair-copy drafts of Dickinson's final letter to Helen Hunt Jackson—A 817; A 818; A 819—composed in March 1885 (THJ, RWF), but never mailed. Dickinson's final intentions toward this fragment remain unknown. It may be an early draft of the passage in the letter to Hunt Jackson or an autonomous pensée composed independently of the letter and incorporated in it because of its momentary aptness.
Tags

< a820.txt.1; message-fragment >

<damage, document scissored>
enitor

<damage, document scissored>
share

<damage, document scissored>
is

<damage, document scissored>
of

<reverse (A 820), paper flipped over right and rotated one-quarter turn left>
< a820.txt.2; fragment_extrageneric >
Strength to
perish is sometimes
withheld -