A 711: etext transcription

The fair-copy poem, composed around 1877 (THJ, RWF), was sent to Samuel Bowles; it is a variant version—though also clearly intended by Dickinson as an independent text—of the final lines of the poem beginning "After all | Birds have | been investigated." Samuel Bowles Jr. gave the manuscript to William Austin Dickinson in 1890. For an earlier fair-copy draft of the poem beginning, "After all | Birds have | been investigated," see A 94-1 / 2 (about 1875 [RWF], about 1877 [THJ]); for a rough-copy draft of the second stanza, see A 127 (about 1877 [THJ, RWF]); for a fair-copy of the poem's final lines identical to the copy sent to Bowles, see A 298 (about 1877 [THJ, RWF]); and, for another, later fair-copy of the poem beginning "After all | Birds have | been investigated" and sent to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, see BPL Higg 35 (about 1877 [THJ, RWF]). For a related fragment, see A 255 (about 1877 [THJ, RWF]). In Poems (1998), R. W. Franklin suggests that A 255 was composed after A 298 and A 711, but before BPL Higg 35, since the fair-copy to Higginson reflects some of the changes introduced in the previous drafts. The definitive compositional history of the textual constellation, however, remains open to speculation.

One editorial notation is penciled on A 711: upper right, MTB: Letters 208. The notation indicates that the text—or a version of it—was previously published in Letters (1931), 208.