A 852: etext transcription

One of the many brief extrageneric texts found among her late papers after her death, Dickinson's final intentions toward this fragment remain unknown. It may have been destined for incorporation into a poem, a letter, or another composition; alternatively, it may be an experiment in aphoristic form. Though the relationship between the texts on the opposite sides of the manuscript is ambiguous, the handwriting is uniform across the manuscript, and the lines on the A 852a appear to complete the text on A 852. For a different interpretation of textual boundaries, see Thomas H. Johnson, Letters (1958): PF 73 and PF 64, respectively. Dickinson may have penciled in variants for "gave" ("left") and "dont" ("wont") either during the initial drive of composition or immediately after finishing a preliminary draft. The variant word choices appear just below the words to which they refer, in a smaller hand. One stray letter, possibly an "e," and two additional stray marks appear along the bottom edge of A 852a; the "e" appears perpendicular to the text of the fragment and probably belongs to an earlier text, perhaps cut away when Dickinson recycled the paper to jot down the extant lines.