This rough-copy poem-draft, composed around 1875 (RWF) or 1876 (THJ) was found among Dickinson's papers after her death. For another rough-copy draft, possibly a re-working of A 404's opening lines, see A 405 (about 1875 [RWF], about 1876 [THJ]); for a fair-copy trial beginning, see A 94-13 (about 1875 [RWF], about 1876 [THJ]); for a complete fair-copy draft, see H 380 (about 1875 [RWF], about 1876 [THJ]); and for a fair-copy enclosed in a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, see BPL Higg 30 (about 1876 [THJ, RWF]). For a related fragment, see A 295 / 296 (about 1875 [RWF], about 1876 or last decade [THJ]). R. W. Franklin hypothesizes that A 296 was composed after A 405, since it offers an alternate reading for the poem's second line. The definitive compositional history of the textual constellation, however, remains open to speculation.

Two editorial notations are penciled on the document: A 404, upper right, MTB: FP; A 404a, below the concluding lines of the poem, upside-down, MLT?: 98 (4). The first notation indicates that the text—or a version of it—was published in Further Poems (1929), 85. The second notation may refer to the number of the envelope, and subdivision within the envelope, in which Mabel Loomis Todd stored this unbound manuscript. In her "GUIDE to the use of the microfilm of THE EMILY DICKINSON MANUSCRIPTS" Millicent Todd Bingham notes that Mabel Loomis Todd affixed the numbers 80–98 to the envelopes containing fascicles or individual poems, while Bingham herself affixed all numbers greater than 98 to the remainder of the envelopes. Presumably Todd, or possibly Bingham, also penciled the notation "98 (4)" on the manuscript itself.