Spring, high summer and winter all pass through these twelve lines, and the speaker keeps interrupting them like a bystander at a parade, shouting advice at the floats. The poem is about the certainty of time's turning and the small, comic, slightly desperate ways we try to manage it. The speaker knows the seasons will arrive whatever she says, so she bargains with them: help this one along, slow that one down, stop the last.
The structure carries the joke. Each stanza opens with a calm prediction ("I suppose the time will come") and then squeezes an order into the second line, a quick aside that breaks the grammar in two. "Aid it in the coming" and "Hinder it a little" read like stage whispers. The lines are short and the beat is light, closer to a skipping rhyme than a solemn meditation. Lines two and four rhyme in every stanza: "coming" with "booming" is a full rhyme, while "little" with "Apple" and "giggle" with "little" are only near-rhymes, sharing a soft, wobbling ending. That looseness suits the tone. The poem sounds tidy but never quite locks shut. The word "little" also appears twice, in stanzas two and three, as if the speaker is haggling over small amounts of time.
The imagery turns the natural world into a household of busy, slightly vain characters. The Bird "crowd[s]" the Tree, so spring is a packed room, and the Bee is "booming," a word that makes a tiny insect sound like a brass band. In the second stanza nature becomes a tailor's shop: Corn is dressed "in Silk," a pun on the real silk of the corn ear, and the Apple wears "Chintz," a cheap, cheerful printed cotton. The capital letters make each creature a named personality. The final stanza gives the Jay a "new white House," and I read that as the earth under snow, though the poem never says so. That is an inference from the colour and from the order of the seasons. Whatever the white house is, the Jay's giggle makes it a joke, and it shows the Jay as delighted with his new property. The tone is playful, but it hides a chill, because the house has been built out of the world's disappearance.
The verbs that govern the speaker's wishes show how her mood changes. She begins by helping time along ("Aid"), moves to a mild request for delay ("Hinder it a little"), and ends with a flat command: "halt." Her opening phrase also changes, from "I suppose" to "I believe." Supposing is casual guesswork, but believing has some weight. By the last stanza she is surer of the future and more afraid of it, since the thing she wants stopped is the one she is most confident will come. The final line, "That, too, halt a little --", ends on a dash and a small request. The "too" admits that she has been asking this all along, and the dash leaves her wish hanging with no answer.
Part of the poem's quiet cleverness is that it never states its sadness. A plainer poem might lament that summer fades and winter follows. Here the feeling comes through tone and word choice: the cheerfulness of "giggle" and "Chintz" set against the helpless instruction to stop what cannot be stopped. The speaker's lightness looks like a way of coping with the fear.
The poem is typical of Emily Dickinson, who lived in Amherst, Massachusetts, wrote close to eighteen hundred poems, and saw most of them published only after her death. She packs a large subject into very little space, uses capitals and dashes to give small things dramatic weight, and treats nature with wit rather than reverence. Birds, bees, corn and apples are made to dress up, show off and laugh, and in the end this makes time itself seem more powerful than the speaker's polite instructions, and more poignant.