H B 123: etext transcription

This letter was sent to Susan Dickinson in autumn 1873 (THJ, RWF, Smith and Hart). For a related fragment, see A 348 (about 1873 [THJ, RWF]). This fair-copy fragment, possibly a compressed poem, appears to have been composed before the letter in which it is embedded. Yet it is also possible that the letter was composed first, and the lines later excerpted. The faultline between prose and verse in the letter is not entirely clear—does prose become verse in the line "Silence is all | we dread," as suggested in the present encoding, or does prose become verse at an earlier or later point?—and further ambiguates the temporal relationship between the fragment and the letter.