A 359: etext transcription

The type and number of texts inscribed across the body of this manuscript, as well as the relations among them, are ambiguous. The first (visible) fragment, beginning "Still (Stern) as the | Profile of a | Tree against," may be the nucleus of an unidentified or lost poem, a radically compressed poem, or an experiment in aphoristic form; above and separated from it by a horizontal line are several stray marks that may belong to this text, or to another text, canceled by tearing. The author of the tears has not been positively identified; they may be the work of a censor or of Dickinson herself. The second visible fragment, separated from the first by a horizontal line and beginning "I never heard | you call anything," appears to be a canceled message-fragment. Millicent Todd Bingham associated the text with Dickinson's correspondence with Judge Otis P. Lord; no complete fair-copy of the message to Lord, however, has come to light, and Dickinson's final intentions toward the fragment remain unknown. The final, uncanceled lines may belong to the message-fragment or to the fragmentary notes above it, or they may be a very brief but autonomous text. The uniformity of the handwriting across the surface of the paper at least suggests that, whatever their relations to one another, the fragments were jotted down during the same scene of writing. Dickinson appears to have revised the texts both during the initial drive of writing, when she composed variants—"sunset sky -"; "evening -"—for "winter sky," and again, later, after completing a preliminary draft, when she probably canceled the opening of the message-fragment. Here Dickinson wrote against the rule of the paper.