A 887: etext transcription

Dickinson's final intentions toward these rough-copy fragments, several of which shift between prose and verse, remain unknown. The text on A 887, a draft of a message to Gilbert Dickinson, appears to be a discrete text, though it may be the beginning (or ending) of the text on A 887a, "Is not the Election | of a Daphne much (more) | more signal than | that of a President - . . . ." Alternatively, the fragment beginning "Is not the Election" may be a discrete pensée, or notes related to the three extrageneric passages also arising on A 887a, though oriented perpendicular to this text. These three extrageneric fragments, separated from one another by horizontal lines, and represented here as a single text, may also be the nuclei of unwritten or lost poems, or experiments in aphoristic form. Dickinson revised as she wrote, composing variants for "much" ("more") and "and" ("for"). She appears to have gone through the texts a second time, when she perhaps composed the variant "Exhilaration of fools" for "hurry of fools" sideways along the left edge of the paper. For a different interpretation of textual boundaries, see Thomas H. Johnson, Letters (1958), PF 36, 62, 69, respectively.