A 868: 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. The blank space separating the first two lines, "Of our deepest delights | there is a solemn shyness," from the next five, "The appetite | for silence | is seldom | an acquired | taste," may indicate that the passages constitute discrete texts; however, the absence of other lines of demarcation, such as the horizontal lines Dickinson often drew to indicate the limits of a text, and the tonal similarity of the passages suggest that the lines belong to the same text. For a different interpretation of textual boundaries, see Thomas H. Johnson's Letters (1958), PF 96 and 106, respectively. Dickinson's handwriting fills the white spaces of the program's margins and then traverses the space between the printed lines. The text of the fragment, which concerns "shyness" and "silence," may constitute an ironic comment on the printed text's announcement of an organ concert.