Home > > A 207: etext transcription
This brief, extrageneric fragment appears as a trace in two other documents, both composed around 1883 (THJ, RWF): first, as a trace (lineation and punctuation altered) in a poem beginning "Her Losses make | our Gains ashamed -" and embedded into a letter to Thomas Niles (A 833); second, as a trace (lineation and punctuation altered) in a variant draft of the poem beginning "His Losses made | our Gains ashamed -" and embedded in a letter sent to Susan Dickinson (H 266). In both instances, the trace appears in the poems' concluding lines. A 207 thus offers evidence of an affinity between fragments and variants: 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. Two diagonal slashes on the manuscript of A 207 almost certainly indicate metrical line breaks. It is possible that other lines followed the second slash, which appears along the scissored right edge of the document. These lines may have been deliberately cut away in an act of revision.
One editorial notation is penciled on A 207: reverse, MTB: Last two lines of "Her losses make our gains ashamed." The notation may have been made when Bingham sorted through the documents left unpublished by her mother, noting cross-references with previously published texts.