A 295 / 296: etext transcription

This is one of a number of late manuscripts in which the opposing sides of the paper constitute separate textual spaces. A 295 carries an extrageneric fragment that appears as a variant trace (text altered) in the poem beginning "No man saw awe, nor to his house" and possibly composed around 1874 (RWF). The manuscript of this poem has been lost; only Mabel Loomis Todd's transcript (A 295a), survives. In Todd's transcript of the poem the trace breaches stanzas, constituting the last line of the first stanza and the first line of the second stanza; Dickinson's original arrangement of the poem may have differed from Todd's. Stray marks visible along the scissored bottom edge of A 295 indicate that lines belonging to this text or, perhaps to another, unrelated text have been lost. They may have been cut away in an act of revision, or when Dickinson decided to jot down the text on the reverse side. A 296 also carries a fragment so brief that, by itself, it remains generically undecidable; however, the careful lineation of the text as well as its reappearance as a variant or rhyming trace (text altered) in five manuscripts of the poem beginning "The last of | Summer is | Delight," all composed around 1875–1876 (THJ; RWF), indicate that A 296 is verse. The manuscripts associated with A 296 are, respectively, an initial rough-copy draft of the poem (A 404); a re-working of the rough-copy draft's opening lines (A 405); a fair-copy trial beginning (A 94-13); a complete fair-copy draft (H 380); and a fair-copy enclosed in a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson (BPL Higg 30). R. W. Franklin speculates that A 296 was composed after A 405, since it offers an alternate reading for the poem's second line. The compositional history, however, remains ambiguous. A 295 and A 296, written in slightly different hands, perhaps on different occasions, are almost certainly discrete texts. Still, since Dickinson jotted down the two fragments on the same scrap, not canceling either but, rather, carefully preserving both texts, they may in some way be related.