One small flower, Dickinson suggests, can hand back a lost garden
A single bloom is hardly worth noticing, Dickinson's speaker admits, unless it quietly restores a garden that has vanished. From there the poem spirals outward into drunken bees, borrowed birdsong and, finally, bobolinks circling a heavenly throne. Twelve lines turn a flowerbed into a glimpse of paradise.
The opening is modest to the point of apology: we should not care about something so tiny. The condition that follows reverses it. If the flower can bring back "Our little garden that we lost", then it matters enormously. Readers can hear an echo of Eden there, a lost garden returned to the lawn, though the poem keeps its scale domestic.
The middle stanza is pure sensation. Carnations nod with spice, bees reel as if drunk, and a hundred flutes seem stolen from a hundred trees, which is how Dickinson turns birdsong into an orchestra hidden in foliage. Each line begins with the same intensifier, so the stanza builds like a crescendo. The final quatrain then makes the leap: anyone who sees the flower can, by faith, make out bobolinks around the throne and golden dandelions. Heaven here is not marble and harps but a meadow with its most ordinary weed gilded.
Nature and mortality are the two subjects that dominate her work, and this poem blends them, using a garden to think about what is lost and what might be recovered. The compression, short lines and off-rhymes are typical of the style that later readers came to call groundbreaking.
Her feel for music and growing things showed early. At two, on a long stay in Monson, an aunt called her a very good child and noted her gift for the piano, which the little girl called the moosic. She later spent seven years at Amherst Academy, whose curriculum included botany and geology alongside Latin and literature. The principal, Daniel Taggart Fiske, remembered her as very bright and an excellent scholar, even though illness cost her whole terms, including a stretch in 1845 and 1846 when she was enrolled for only eleven weeks.
Source: We should not mind so small a flower
