H 159: etext transcription

Dickinson bound this fair-copy poem-draft into a manuscript volume around 1863 (THJ) or 1864 (RWF). For related fragments, see A 100 (about 1863 [THJ], about 1864 [RWF]) and A 313 (about 1873 [RWF], about 1874 [THJ]). The early fragment may have catalyzed the composition of the first version of the poem, or it may be a reworking of the last lines of the first version's second stanza, composed shortly after Dickinson completed the first version of the text. Dickinson may have remembered—returned to?—the fragment approximately ten years later when she began composing a second version of the poem. The later fragment is a variant of the earlier fragment as well, of course, as a variant of the lines in H 159. Although neither fragment appears as a trace in the latter version of the poem (H 322), both may have in some sense catalyzed the compositional process.

Three editorial notations are penciled on H 159: upper left, David Peck Todd: 30 (blue pencil); upper left: 9; upper left: ch. In his introduction to Poems (1955) Thomas H. Johnson offers the following description of David Todd's numbering of manuscript volumes: "With a blue pencil Professor Todd placed a number at the top of the first page of each packet and, as they later came into his house, on the envelopes containing the remaining manuscripts. His sequence goes 1 through 40, 80 through 110." In The Editing of Emily Dickinson (1967) R. W. Franklin suggests that the numbering may instead have been done by Todd's wife: "The numbering of the packets, mostly in blue pencil, appears to me to have been largely done by Mrs. Todd. Millicent Todd Bingham, who is thoroughly familiar with her mother's handwriting, agrees" (149 n. 23). In The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson (1981), however, Franklin appears in this case to agree with Johnson and identifies the mark as David Todd's. The authorship and significance of the other editorial notations on H 159 have not been established.