A 112: etext transcription

This brief, extrageneric fragment appears as a trace in two other documents, both composed around 1883 (RWF) or 1884 (THJ): first, in a fair-copy poem-draft, with alternatives, beginning, "A Sloop of | Amber slips away" (A 386), where it appears as the final (variant) lines of the draft; and second, as a "rhyming" trace (text altered) in a fair-copy of the same poem incorporated into a letter-draft possibly intended for Professor Tuckerman; see A 836. A 112 offers additional evidence of an affinity between fragments and variants. Here a single horizontal pencil line is still visible along the torn top edge of the manuscript, and, since Dickinson frequently drew horizontal lines to separate the body of a poem from its variants, it is likely that this scrap carries variant lines torn away from their original body. Like the variant word choices rowing below so many of Dickinson's poems in the manuscript volumes, the late fragments constitute evidence of a crisis of and at the limits of texts. Unlike the variant word choices in the manuscript volumes, however, the late fragments appear outside the trace poems' gravitational fields; materially speaking, such fragments often attain the status of radically compressed but independent texts.