A 351 / 352: etext transcription

The relationship between the two extrageneric fragments inscribed across the inside of the envelope flap and separated only by a vertical pencil line is ambiguous. Though no link beyond a material one has ever been established between them, it is nonetheless possible that the vertical line does not divide two discrete texts but, rather, marks internal textual divisions (lines, stanzas) of a single, hitherto unrecognized text, "A 351 / 352." Alternatively, A 351, which does not reappear in any other extant composition, may be the nucleus of an unwritten or lost poem, or, perhaps, a radically compressed but autonomous poem. A 352, a single lyric throe too brief to be positively identified as verse by itself, appears as a variant trace (text altered) in two substantively identical fair copies of the poem beginning "Step lightly on | this narrow spot -" ("Step lightly | on this narrow | Spot") and composed around 1871 (THJ, RWF). One fair-copy draft of the poem was found among Dickinson's papers after her death; see A 95-12 / 13; the other fair-copy was enclosed in a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson (BPL Higg 26). A copy of the first stanza of the poem (H 322), not including the trace, was sent to Susan Dickinson, also around 1871.

The discrepancy in dating schemes offered by Thomas H. Johnson and R. W. Franklin for A 352 is interesting. Franklin's dating and his arrangements of the texts for " document suggest that A 352 was an avant-text, composed just slightly in advance of A 95-12 / 13, the 1871 version of the poem in which it appears as a trace. Johnson's dating suggests instead that it is an après-text, composed after the 1871 poem in which it appears as a trace. Both versions of dating are at least possible, since just as Dickinson's poems often evolve out of fragments, so they often break down into fragments again, after attaining, sometimes only briefly, a finished form. In either case, A 352, while belonging to the constellation of texts that includes the poem in which it appears as a (variant) trace, may also be an independent or autonomous text.