A 313 / 314: etext transcription

The relationship between the two extrageneric fragments inscribed across the inside of the torn envelope and separated only by a horizontal pencil line is unknown. Though no link beyond a material one has ever been established between them, it is nonetheless possible that the texts are connected. Dickinson used horizontal lines not only to mark the boundaries of discrete texts but also to mark internal textual divisions—stanza and line breaks, for example—and to separate the body of a poem from its variants. Thus, A 313 and A 314 may be increments of a single (lost) poem or other composition. Alternatively, "A 313 / 314" may together constitute a new, hitherto unrecognized because radically compressed, text. Both fragments appear, separately, as traces in different poems. A 313 appears as a trace in two other documents: first, as a late variant version (text altered) of an early verse fragment, "Myself computed were they | Pearls | What affluence could be -"(A 100), possibly composed in 1863 (THJ) or 1864 (RWF); and, again, as a variant trace (text altered) in the poem beginning "A Drop fell on the | Apple Tree -" (H 159) and also composed around 1863 (THJ) or 1864 (RWF). A 313 may have been composed (recalled?) when Dickinson returned to revise "A Drop fell on the | Apple Tree -" in the 1870s, at least ten years after composing and copying the text into a manuscript volume. Though A 313 does not reappear as a trace in the later version of the poem (H 322), which begins with the third stanza of the earlier version, it may nonetheless have been the point of departure for the late compositional process. A 314 appears in two variant versions of the poem beginning "'Remember me' | implored the Thief!" ("'Remember me; | implored the | Thief -"): first, as a variant or rhyming trace (text altered) in a fair-copy draft of the poem (A 93-7) composed around 1871 (THJ, RWF), and, second, as an exact trace in a later, fair-copy of the poem (H 307) composed and sent to Susan Dickinson around around 1873 (RWF) or 1874 (THJ). It may have been composed between the first and second versions, since the second fair-copy (H 307) to Sue reflects change of wording offered in the fragment.

If Johnson's and Franklin's dating schemes are correct, both A 313 and A 314 were composed long after the first versions of the poems with which they are associated. Thus, just as poems often evolve out of fragments, so they often break down into fragments again, after attaining, briefly, a finished form. These fragments, while belonging to the constellation of texts that includes the poems in which they appear as traces, may also achieve the status of freestanding lyrics.