A 405: etext transcription

This rough-copy poem-draft, composed around 1875 (RWF) or 1876 (THJ), was found among Dickinson's papers after her death. It may be a re-working of the opening lines of A 404 and was probably pinned to that document. For the initial rough-copy draft of the poem, see A 404 (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, seeH 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]). In Poems (1998), 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.