This is one of a number of late manuscripts in which the opposite sides of the paper appear to constitute separate textual spaces. A 254, an autonomous, extrageneric fragment, may have been destined for incorporation into a poem, a letter, or another composition; alternatively, it may be a radically compressed poem-draft unrecognized as such because of the crudeness of its material container. Though no conclusive evidence exists to prove that it is a verse fragment, two features strongly suggest it is: first, the careful lineation of the text; and, second, the presence of a horizontal pencil line, the same kind of line often used to separate the body of a poem from its variants, along the scissored top edge of the document. A 255, by itself an extrageneric fragment, appears as a trace or a variant trace in five documents composed between 1875 and 1877: an unbound, fair-copy draft of the poem beginning, "After all | Birds have | been investigated" and composed about 1875 (RWF) or about 1877 (THJ) (A 94-1 / 2); a rough- or intermediate-copy draft of the second stanza beginning "First at the | March" and composed about 1877 (THJ, RWF) (A 127); an unbound fair-copy draft of the last lines of the poem beginning "Last to | adhere | When Summers | swerve away -" and composed about 1877 (THJ, RWF) (A 298); an identical fair-copy draft of the poem's final lines beginning "Last to | adhere | When Summers | swerve away -" and sent to Samuel Bowles about 1877 (THJ, RWF]) (A 711); and a later, variant fair-copy of "After all | Birds have | been investigated" enclosed in a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson about 1877 (THJ, RWF) (BPL Higg 35). R. W. Franklin suggests that A 255 was composed after A 298 and A 711, but before BPL Higg 35, since the fair-copy to Higginson reflects some of the changes introduced in the previous drafts. The definitive compositional history of the textual constellation, however, remains open to speculation. In all instances the trace appears in the texts' concluding lines. A 255 thus offers some 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. A 254 and A 255, written in slightly different hands, probably on different occasions, are almost certainly discrete texts. Still, since Dickinson jotted down the two fragments on the same scrap, not canceling either but, rather, carefully preserving both, they may in some way be related. The fragments appear to have been composed over the pen tests and practice signatures.

One editorial notation is penciled on A 255: sideways in the right margin, MTB: after all birds. The notation may have been made when Bingham sorted through the documents left unpublished by her mother, noting cross-references with previously published texts.