Summary
The speaker begins by assuring her listener that she could give them a gift of jewels if she wanted to, but that the listener already has enough jewels. She lists other gifts she might give, if she chose: odors (or perfume), from the Caribbean city of St. Domingo, colors, (dyes) from the Mexican state of Vera Cruz, and berries from the island nation of the Bahamas. Though she possesses all of these things, she says, she prefers a small fire burning in a meadow. Nothing can match the topaz-hued flower or its green stem. Indeed, such an object would suit the dowry of a very rich man. What better thing could the speaker give?
Analysis
From the start, this poem has a simple, intimate directness. Its speaker is tender as she addresses a loved one, but at the same time possesses a calm confidence. This is evident in her straightforward declarative sentences, and in the utter assurance with which she makes her capabilities known, speaking in a relaxed way about her ability to obtain fine objects. Dickinson subverts the expected symbolism of images like jewels or perfumes, having her speaker frame these things as unremarkable whereas a reader might generally expect such images to be treated reverently within a work of poetry. With this confident subversion of expectations, Dickinson risks crafting a speaker who seems frustratingly arrogant, rather than refreshingly different. One way in which Dickinson avoids this is simply through the premise of the poem. Even as the speaker coolly asserts her uninterest in luxuries, she does so in the context of seeking a gift for a friend—this speaker is above all considerate and loving.
Moreover, Dickinson uses pauses and punctuation to show the inner workings of the speaker's mind: hesitation, doubt, and association seem to play out in real-time as we read. The poem frequently features caesura—a mid-line pause, represented here through the use of hyphens. Caesuras, in conjunction with hyphens falling at the end of lines, allow us to perceive the halting, piece-by-piece thought processes taking place in the speaker's mind. Though her words are assured, her rhythms are thoughtful and unrushed. Almost every line in this poem contains caesura, and those that do not still end with a hyphen, creating a sense of hesitancy. Only one line has no punctuation-based pauses at all: line 6, "But this little Blaze." This line represents a turning point in the poem's focus. Rather than listing rejected gifts, as in the work's first half, from now on the work will focus on describing and praising the "little Blaze." This single short line with no pauses perhaps depicts a sudden epiphany for the reader, or else conveys her lack of doubt surrounding the beauty of the flower. The line's lack of pauses also keeps it short and contained, echoing the small, contained beauty of the object being described.
There is a telling contrast between the way the poem describes the first several listed objects (the jewels, "Colors," "Odors," and berries) and its description of the flower. Each of these first few items is described in highly literal terms, with a terse one-word name followed by a description of origins. This is very different from the way in which the flower is described. The word "flower" never appears in the poem. Instead, Dickinson portrays the image obliquely, through metaphorical clues. The flower is a "blaze," its stem a "swing." Its colors are conveyed through metaphors related to jewels—topaz and emerald—itself a nod towards the flower's value relative to the "jewels" in the poem's title. Through this elliptical mode of description, Dickinson turns a simple, familiar image into a riddle, filling it with novelty. Furthermore, while the expensive and desirable objects at the poem's beginning are easily understood by the reader, it is the flower that the reader is in a sense required to "pay" for by putting in effort and thought. Through these contrasting descriptions, Dickinson reverses the value of these two types of objects, making the flower feel far more rare and elusive than these other items.
The argument that the flower exceeds the other luxurious items in value is ironic and unexpected, and in this irony Dickinson both reasserts her speaker's closeness with the addressee and critiques nineteenth-century industrialization and consumerism. By enjoining the addressee to appreciate the flower and reject or ignore the more commonly-valued items, the speaker suggests that these two individuals are unconventional in the same way. The gift the speaker hopes to give is not only a gesture of kindness and generosity. Rather, it is a way of reiterating the pair's similarity to one another. Furthermore, by positing that a part of the local natural landscape is more beautiful, interesting, and valuable than other consumer goods, the speaker lightly chastises the nineteenth century's systems of industrialization, global trade, and extractive colonialism. These networks, Dickinson argues, produce things that seem exciting. But beyond their novelty, these newly available treasures are no more special than the often-forgotten products of the natural world.
