Most flower poems mourn the blossom. Dickinson looks instead at what is left once the petals have gone: the bare stem, usually the first thing we throw away. In four lines she argues that it deserves respect. "The stem of a departed Flower / Has still a silent rank." The central idea is that something which once carried beauty keeps its dignity after the beauty is gone. A job well done leaves a kind of authority behind it.
The second sentence is trickier, and it works like a riddle. It has no verb at all: "The Bearer from an Emerald Court / Of a Despatch of Pink." Unscrambled, the "Bearer" is the stem itself, the "Emerald Court" is the green world of leaves and garden it grew from, and the "Despatch of Pink" is the bloom it delivered. The stem becomes a courier who carried a message in pink from a green palace. Because the sentence lacks a verb, the delivery never quite finishes. The poem trails off after the message has been handed over, which suits a poem about something that has already gone.
Almost every important word comes from the language of rank and officialdom: "rank," "Bearer," "Court," "Despatch." Dickinson dresses a humble plant in the vocabulary of soldiers, diplomats and royalty. "Emerald" adds jewel-like richness to ordinary green. "Silent" is the most telling word in the poem. A stem cannot speak, and a messenger whose message is delivered has nothing left to say, but the rank survives without anyone announcing it. Some further echoes seem possible, though they are my reading rather than anything the poem states. "Departed" is a familiar way of saying someone has died. "Despatch" can mean a sending-off as well as a message. And a "Bearer" can carry a coffin as well as a letter. Under the garden imagery there may be a quieter thought about how we honour the dead.
The sound and shape support this. The lines roughly follow the alternating long and short pattern of a hymn stanza, which gives the poem a faintly ceremonial tone, though the third line stretches past the pattern as if it can't quite be contained. The rhyme is slant: "rank" and "Pink" share their ending consonants but not their vowel. That near-miss keeps the poem from sounding too tidy. "Flower" and "Court" are left unrhymed, so the first and third lines hang loose. In this text Dickinson also capitalises Flower, Bearer, Emerald Court and Despatch, as if they were titles or proper names. The stem is promoted on the page as well as in the argument.
The last word is "Pink," the only colour named besides emerald. Ending on it leaves a flash of bright colour in the reader's mind after the stem has been established as the subject. The flower is gone, yet the final image is still its colour. The poem suggests that what a stem carried is not wiped out when the flower falls. Memory keeps it, and so does the plain stalk that held it up.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in so little space. Dickinson, who lived in Amherst, Massachusetts, and left behind nearly 1,800 poems, most of them unpublished in her lifetime, was a master of compression, and here she turns a four-line observation into a small drama of service, loss and honour. She also trusts the reader to solve the puzzle, and the pleasure comes from the moment the Bearer is recognised as a stalk of green. After that, an object we barely notice looks like it has been holding rank all along.