A 94-13: etext transcription

This fair-copy trial beginning for the poem "The last of | Summer is" was found among Dickinson's papers after her death. Though it was composed in 1875 (RWF) or 1876 (THJ), long after she had ceased binding her work into manuscript volumes, the trial beginning has been carefully copied and may constitute evidence that Dickinson continued, at least on occasion, to prepare manuscripts for binding in the 1870s. Mabel Loomis Todd completed the last line of the trial beginning, adding, in pencil, the words "in retrospect." For an initial rough-copy draft of the poem, see A 404 (about 1875 [RWF], about 1876 [THJ]); for a another draft, possibly a re-working of the rough-copy draft's opening lines, see A 405 (about 1875 [RWF], about 1876 [THJ]); for a fair-copy draft, seeH 380 (about 1875 [RWF], about 1876 [THJ]); and for a fair-copy enclosed in a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, see BPL Higg 30 (about 1876 [THJ, RWF]). For a related fragment, see A 295 / 296 (about 1875 [RWF], about 1876 or last decade [THJ]). In Poems (1998), R. W. Franklin hypothesizes that A 296 was composed after A 405, since it offers an alternate reading for the poem's second line. The definitive compositional history of the textual constellation, however, remains open to speculation.

One editorial notation is penciled on A 94-13: upper right, MTB: FP. The notation indicates that the text—or a version of it—was published in Further Poems (1929), 85.