A 872: 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; or, possibly, a compressed lyric poem unrecognized as such because of the crudeness of its material container. The stray marks just visible along the top edge of the paper indicate that text has been lost beyond the tear; the lost text may have been part of the extant fragment, perhaps deliberately cut away by Dickinson in an act of revision, or part of another text, cut away when she recycled the paper to compose the extant lines. As Dickinson wrote, she also revised, penciling in the variant "terrible" for "dreadful." An ambiguous mark of punctuation, here rendered "/," appears in the text beside the word "sorrow." It may be a comma, a semicolon, or a private form of punctuation used to guide the writer-reader's eye through the text.