A bee at a flower is one of the most ordinary sights in a garden, and Dickinson turns it into a small drama of manners. In six lines, a gentle scolding ends by swinging the blame round to the very person who seemed to be the victim.
The opening sounds like a proverb: "The Flower must not blame the Bee." The speaker is advising, almost reprimanding, the flower. The bee "seeketh his felicity / Too often at her door," and the word choice is the first joke. "Felicity" is a grand, Latinate word for happiness, and "seeketh" borrows the old -eth ending of antique English. Together they make the bee sound like a courteous gentleman caller of an earlier age, not a pest. Whatever he is doing, the language insists he is doing it politely and for understandable reasons.
The second stanza begins with "But," and the poem pivots from defending the bee to giving orders. The flower turns out to have a household: a "Footman" and a "Mistress." Vevay is presumably the Swiss town on Lake Geneva, usually spelled Vevey, which would give the servant a continental polish, though the poem never explains it. What matters is the phrase he must be taught to say: "not at home." In the social world the poem imitates, that was a polite fiction. The lady is perfectly at home, but she does not wish to see you. Dickinson sets the phrase in quotation marks, as if holding it up with tongs.
The last two lines can be read in two ways. If the footman must stop saying "not at home," then the bee comes "too often" because he is never let in, and the flower's own coyness creates the persistence she complains about. If the footman must start saying it firmly, then the cure for unwanted callers lies in the flower's own household, not in blaming the caller. Both readings put the responsibility at her door, which is exactly where the poem started. The ambiguity is part of the pleasure, since the speaker keeps a straight face while the sentence quietly tilts.
The form helps. Lines one, two, four and five are tetrameter, roughly four beats of eight syllables, and they run easily, like polite conversation. Lines three and six shrink to six syllables, so each stanza ends on a short, clipped line, almost like a door being closed. The rhyme scheme is aab ccb: "Bee" with "felicity," "Vevay" with "say," and then "door" in the first stanza answers "more" in the second. The poem ends on the sound of its own threshold. The only exclamation mark falls on "any more!", and the tone slips from smooth advice into brisk exasperation.
Dickinson's punctuation adds to the effect. The dashes in "to say -- / To people -- any more!" break the instruction into pieces, as though the speaker were delaying the verdict for a smirk. The capitalised nouns (Flower, Bee, Footman, Mistress) turn the creatures and servants into characters in a miniature allegory.
Emily Dickinson lived in Amherst, Massachusetts, and left close to 1,800 poems, most of them unpublished in her lifetime. Because she is famous for a life spent largely at home, it is tempting to hear autobiography in "not at home," but nothing in the poem requires it. It works perfectly well as social comedy.
The poem matters because it packs so much into so little. A bee and a flower become a caller and a hostess, and a courtship becomes a question about responsibility. The speaker exposes politeness as a way of dodging honesty: the phrase "not at home" lets everyone avoid saying what they want. By the end, the flower who "blames" has become the one who has to decide what her door is for.