A 186: etext transcription

These fragments, shifting between prose and verse, fall outside conventional genre categories; Dickinson's final intentions regarding them remain unknown. Moreover, while the two fragments arise on the same page and were almost certainly composed during the same scene of composition—the handwriting is uniform across the manuscript—the nature of their relationship to one another is not clear. The first fragment, beginning "Fly - fly - but as you fly -," appears to be the draft or nucleus of an unidentified or lost poem; the second fragment, beginning "Paradise is no Journey," and separated from the first by a broken horizontal line, may be an introduction to the poem-notes, a passage intended for incorporation into a letter, or a discrete pensée. As Dickinson wrote she also revised. In the first fragment she drew a broken horizontal line under "Ah the Responsibility - ," below which she composed the variant lines: "Such a (What a -) Responsibility." She appears to have gone through the text a second time with a sharpened pencil, canceling the variants below the horizontal line by drawing heavy vertical lines through them and adding yet another variant, "what a," supralinearly, with a different pencil. The interlineations in the fragment beginning "Paradise is no Journey," both the unresolved variant "he" and the addition "very," may also have been added at this time. Dickinson's use here of broken horizontal lines to mark both the limits of discrete, though possibly related, texts and to mark internal textual limits (i.e., to divide the body of the text from a variant reading) reminds us of the difficulty of interpreting boundaries within and between her texts.