A 883: etext transcription

This is one of a number of late manuscripts in which the opposite sides of the paper appear to constitute separate textual spaces. A 883a, inscribed "Little Margaret," appears to be a fair-copy address or salutation, possibly excerpted from a lost message. The identity of "Little Margaret" is uncertain. Abigail Girdler Cooper's granddaughter Margaret was born in 1884; a letter composed by Dickinson to Abigail Cooper in 1884 (THJ) carries a pinned slip (YUL) inscribed "Little Margaret," and it is likely that this fragment also refers to her. There is, however, another possibility. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, too, had a daughter named Margaret, to whom Dickinson also wrote in 1884 (THJ); her message (see Letters [1958], L 893) remembers Higginson's infant daughter Louisa, who died before Margaret's birth. The "Lethargies of Loneliness" may refer to Margaret's (or Higginson's) loss of Louisa or to another, private grief, the source of which is unrecoverable. The fragment inscribed on A 883 is too brief to be generically decidable: it may be a single lyric throe destined for incorporation into a poem, a passage destined for incorporation into a letter, or a cryptic but complete message. Though no link has ever been established between the texts on A 883 and A 883a, it is worth noting that Dickinson seems to have wished to preserve both fragments: the paper has been carefully torn, and both texts appear centered on the scrap. Because of the ambiguous nature of the text, A 883a appears in both the "Index of Trace Fragments" and in the "Index of Other Texts Inscribed on Documents Carrying Fragments."