H 380: etext transcription

This fair-copy poem-draft, composed around 1875 (RWF) or 1876 (THJ), was found among Dickinson's papers after her death. Though it was composed long after Dickinson had ceased binding her work into manuscript volumes, it has been carefully copied and may constitute evidence that she continued, at least on occasion, to prepare manuscripts for binding in the 1870s. One stab hole along the left-hand edge of the document perhaps indicates that Dickinson intended to bind the sheet into a manuscript volume but later abandoned the idea. For an initial rough-copy draft of the poem, see A 404 (about 1875 [RWF], about 1876 [THJ]); for a re-working of the rough-copy draft's opening lines, see A 405 (about 1875 [RWF], about 1876 [THJ]); for a fair-copy trial beginning, see A 94-13 (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.

Three editorial notations are penciled on the recto of H 380: at top, center, Mary Lee Hall: 0; at top, center, SHGD?: +; upper right, MDB: No. After Mabel Loomis Todd stopped working on Dickinson's manuscripts, Lavinia Dickinson employed Mary Lee Hall to copy poems. Hall's notation identifies poems not published in the first three series of Poems (1890, 1891, 1896). Similarly, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, who inherited her mother's stock of Dickinson manuscripts, marked those not published No. The + may indicate Susan Dickinson's or, possibly, Lavinia Dickinson's ranking of the poem.