This is one of a number of late manuscripts in which the opposing sides of the
paper constitute separate textual spaces. A 295 carries an extrageneric fragment
that appears as a variant trace (text altered) in the poem beginning "No man saw
awe, nor to his house" and possibly composed around 1874 (RWF). The manuscript of
this poem has been lost; only Mabel Loomis Todd's transcript (A 295a), survives. In Todd's transcript of the poem
the trace breaches stanzas, constituting the last line of the first stanza and the
first line of the second stanza; Dickinson's original arrangement of the poem may
have differed from Todd's. Stray marks visible along the scissored bottom edge of
A 295 indicate that lines belonging to this text or, perhaps to another, unrelated
text have been lost. They may have been cut away in an act of revision, or when
Dickinson decided to jot down the text on the reverse side. A 296 also carries a
fragment so brief that, by itself, it remains generically undecidable; however,
the careful lineation of the text as well as its reappearance as a variant or
rhyming trace (text altered) in five manuscripts of the poem beginning "The last
of | Summer is | Delight," all composed around 1875–1876 (THJ; RWF),
indicate that A 296 is verse. The manuscripts associated with A 296 are,
respectively, an initial rough-copy draft of the poem (A
404); a re-working of the rough-copy draft's opening lines (A 405); a fair-copy trial beginning (A 94-13); a complete fair-copy draft (H 380); and a fair-copy enclosed in a letter to
Thomas Wentworth Higginson (BPL Higg 30). R.
W. Franklin speculates that A 296 was composed after A 405, since it offers an
alternate reading for the poem's second line. The compositional history, however,
remains ambiguous. A 295 and A 296, written in slightly different hands, perhaps
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 texts, they may in some way be related.