Most love poems promise to love forever. Dickinson's speaker makes a stranger and more generous offer: to become the beloved's summer. "Summer for thee, grant I may be / When Summer days are flown!" The sentence is twisted into a request ("grant that I may be Summer for you"), and that twist gives it the sound of a prayer. When the real season has gone, the speaker will stand in for it. The same goes for sound. When the "Whipporwill / And Oriole" have finished, the speaker will be "Thy music still." Both birds belong to the warm months, so the speaker is promising to replace everything that winter takes away.
The second stanza pushes the promise past the seasons and into death. "For thee to bloom, I'll skip the tomb." The verb is the surprise. Nobody skips a tomb in solemn language, but you can skip a puddle or a step, and the word makes death sound like a small obstacle. The next line, "And row my blossoms o'er!", is harder to pin down. One reading is that "row" means rowing across water, so the speaker ferries the blossoms over the grave. The poem doesn't settle it, and the strangeness suits a speaker who treats the boundary of death so lightly.
The sound of the poem does much of this work. The first stanza alternates longer and shorter lines, a hymn-like lilt, and "still" and "Whipporwill" chime inside line three before "flown" and "done" end the stanza on a near-rhyme rather than a perfect one. That slight mismatch leaves the stanza a little open. In the second stanza, "bloom" and "tomb" rhyme within a single line, so life and death sit side by side and are made to agree. "O'er" in line two is answered by "forevermore" in the last line, as if the end of the poem were pulling back toward its middle. Then come the two shortest lines, "Pray gather me -- / Anemone --". Here "me" and "Anemone" rhyme, so the speaker and the flower become one in sound before the poem says so outright. Dickinson's dashes work like held breaths. They slow the lines down just where the speaker's confidence turns into pleading.
That turn is the poem's real subject. It begins with grand claims: a whole season, all the birdsong, victory over the grave. It ends with a small, specific request. The speaker has shrunk into a single flower, and the anemone is a good choice. It is a delicate bloom, and its name comes from the Greek word for wind, which suggests something light that could be blown away. "Pray" echoes the "grant" of the opening line, but now the speaker is the one asking to be picked. There is a quiet tension in "gather," because picking a flower usually ends its life on the plant. Judging by the poem, though, being gathered is how the speaker wants to belong. To be held by the beloved is worth more than staying rooted in the ground. "Thy flower" has only two words, but the possessive carries the whole emotional weight.
The poem is also notable for what it leaves out. It never says who "thee" is, so the devotion is not tied to one named person and could be read as romantic love, friendship, or something less easy to label. In only nine lines it moves from boasting to humility, from the sweep of seasons to one flower in a hand. Dickinson, who lived from 1830 to 1886 in Amherst, Massachusetts, and left most of her poems unpublished during her lifetime, often packed large ideas into small spaces, and this poem is a good example. Its main claim is that lasting love is not grand or loud. It lasts by being small enough to be carried and kept. The cheerful way it handles the tomb is part of that claim, because a love this sure of itself can treat death as something to hop over.