Emily Dickinson makes a compliment out of a shoemaker's measurements. The poem takes the oldest image of smallness and delicacy, a flower, and then beats it. A flower, she says, has "so small a Foot" that it will not "trouble" the unnamed "her". But once you "compare the Lasts", the wooden foot-shaped forms on which shoes are made, "Hers is the smallest Boot". The central idea is a playful hyperbole: this woman or girl is so slight that she outdoes the proverbial symbol of fragility.
The logic is slyer than it first looks. The word "trouble" can mean several things, and the poem never says which it intends. A flower might not burden her, not get in her way, or not rival her. The small foot is given as the reason, and the "And yet" in line two then turns the argument upside down: small as the flower is, she is smaller still. Nothing tells us who "her" is, and the poem offers no name, age or setting. Judging by the tone, she could be a child, a beloved woman, or a figure invented for the joke. Because she is only a pronoun, the reader supplies her, and she can shrink to fit the exaggeration.
The form is neater than the three-line layout suggests. Count the syllables in the first line and you get fourteen, which splits naturally into eight and six: "A Flower will not trouble her, / it has so small a Foot". The next line has eight syllables and the last has six. Read this way, the poem is a quatrain in the pattern of a hymn or ballad, with lines of 8, 6, 8 and 6, and "Foot" and "Boot" falling at the ends of the second and fourth lines. Dickinson squeezes that familiar, singsong shape into three lines, so the rhythm keeps its bounce while the poem looks sparer and more offhand. The rhyme is slightly off as well. On the page "Foot" and "Boot" match, but to modern ears the vowels differ, so the sounds nearly meet without quite fitting. That suits a poem about comparison and close measurement.
The vocabulary does much of the work. "Lasts" is a trade word, and it makes the speaker sound like someone who has actually checked, a mock-expert presenting evidence in a court of daintiness. It also keeps the poem concrete. The delicate image is built from leather, wood and a cobbler's tools. "Boot" is the funniest word. A boot is the sturdy, practical item among shoes, and the poem sets that heavy word against the smallest foot imaginable. The closing sound is a solid, blunt "Boot", and the smallness arrives with a small comic thud. The capitalised nouns, "Flower", "Foot", "Lasts", "Boot", make each one stand up like an exhibit, which is how Dickinson often treats ordinary objects. The dash at the end leaves the thought hanging, as if she has made her point and is leaving the reader to enjoy it.
The personification is light but effective. Giving a flower a "Foot" turns it into a little walker who might tread on someone's patch, which is the picture behind "trouble". The flower becomes a polite neighbour, too small to be a nuisance, and the poem then reveals a neighbour who is smaller yet. Two kinds of smallness are being set side by side, the natural and the human, and the human wins.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in so little space. Dickinson wrote in Amherst, Massachusetts, and left behind close to 1,800 poems, many of them very short. This one shows what that compression can do. In three lines she sets up a stock comparison, overturns it with "And yet", and ends on a punchline. It also shows a side of her work that is easy to forget, the comic and mischievous side, which delights in sound and in surprising turns of logic. The poem is slight on purpose. It is a small thing about a small thing, and the neat fit between its size and its subject is where the pleasure lies.