Friendship and Love
The speaker's search for a perfect gift reflects not just perfectionism, but a desire to present a loved one with something suitable and worthy. The initial gifts that the speaker proposes are beautiful and costly, but conventional, reflecting broad consumerist passions. Moreover, these gifts are impersonal: they are imported from faraway locales that evidently have little to do with the speaker or her addressee. Instead, the speaker prefers a humbler present, but one with a much more personal link to herself and her addressee: the flower grows in or near the place where they presumably spend time together. Moreover, appreciating it demands a certain open-minded wonder towards nature. By arguing that it would make a good present for the addressee, the speaker suggests that she and the addressee share this attitude, and thus are connected by something deeper and more unusual than mere consumer taste.
Nature
This is one of the most persistent themes in Emily Dickinson's work, which often focuses on detailed descriptions of the natural world. In this poem, an easily-ignored flower in a meadow is positively contrasted with a series of desirable, hard-to-find imports. Dickinson suggests that everyday nature, if examined with fresh eyes, is more beautiful and exciting than even the most novel gifts and objects. This claim also has a subtle political resonance in the context of mid-nineteenth century America: industrialization had made consumer goods like the ones described in the poem more affordable for many families, while colonialism in Latin America and the Caribbean had increased the availability of and desire for imports from those regions. By directly arguing for the superiority of a local wildflower over these imported goods, Dickinson offers a critique of these new international webs of consumption and extraction, while reflecting on the arbitrariness surrounding designations of social and economic value.
