This is one of a number of late manuscripts in which the opposite sides of the paper constitute separate textual spaces. The fair-copy text on A 444 is a poem, the first line of which has been lost beyond the tear. An unmutilated variant copy of the poem (H 353), also written around 1879 (THJ, RWF), survives and supplies what is probably the missing line: "The Sweets of | Pillage, can be known." The rough-copy text on A 444a may be a passage destined for incorporation into the body of a letter, notes toward a poem, or an autonomous lyric pensée. Dickinson appears to have revised the rough-copy text both during the initial drive of composition, when she penciled in a variant, "acre," for "tillage," and again after completing a preliminary draft, when she probably canceled the word "best" and composed a variant passage for lines 5–8 of the text in the empty space below the text proper. Dickinson drew a horizontal line below the text proper, presumably to separate the body of the text from the variant passage; she revised the variant passage as she composed it, canceling "quivered" and substituting "rumbled."

Two editorial notations are penciled on the manuscript: A 444, top, right, MTB (?): 109; A 444a, bottom, partly erased, MTB: "The Sweets of Pillage." Both notations identify the earliest published source of the lines as The Single Hound (1914), 109.