Dickinson never shows us the sun. In "I'll tell you how the Sun rose," she describes everything that happens around it, such as ribbons, steeples, squirrels, bonnets and birds, and keeps the sun itself offstage. The speaker doesn't even claim to have seen it. Only after the commotion does she say, almost under her breath, "That must have been the Sun." The word "must" matters. Sunrise here is deduced from its effects, like a visitor recognised by the noise he makes arriving in another room.
The effects are small and domestic. Light comes "A Ribbon at a time," as if dawn were being unspooled from a shop counter, and the image makes the slow brightening of the horizon look almost tactile. The "Steeples swam in Amethyst," so that stiff church spires turn liquid and violet. Then the poem swerves into gossip: "The news, like Squirrels, ran." Light becomes news, and news is quick, jumpy and hard to pin down. The comparison is funny, but it also catches the way brightness flickers from rooftop to treetop. The hills "untied their Bonnets," as though neighbours were dressing for a morning gathering. The whole landscape becomes a village waking up, and the bobolinks, small songbirds, join in last. Their verb is "begun" rather than the expected "began," a small irregularity that lets the line rhyme with "Sun" and perhaps adds a touch of rustic informality.
Midway, the poem changes footing. "But how he set -- I know not --" sounds like an admission of defeat, yet the speaker goes on to describe it anyway, hedging with "seemed." She sees "a purple stile" (a set of steps over a fence) and "little Yellow boys and girls" climbing it. Judging by the colours, these children are the last bright patches of sky, and the stile is the darkening edge of the day. They are shepherded off by "a Dominie in Gray," an old word for a schoolmaster or minister, who "Put gently up the evening Bars" and "led the flock away." "Flock" quietly gathers several meanings at once: sheep, pupils, a congregation. The adverb "gently" is important too, because nothing in this sunset is violent or dramatic. Dusk is simply good order restored.
The sound of the poem supports that contrast. The first stanza is loose and playful. Its only full rhyme is "begun" and "Sun," while "time" and "ran" slip past each other without matching. The second stanza settles into clean pairs, "stile" with "while" and "Gray" with "away," as if the rhymes themselves were being lined up and marched off. Throughout, the lines are short, mostly three or four beats, with the compressed, hymn-like movement Dickinson often favoured. Her dashes work as breaths and hesitations. They make the speaker sound like someone thinking aloud, correcting herself, and delighting in what she notices.
The poem's significance lies in how it shrinks an enormous, daily event to the scale of a village, a nursery and a schoolroom, without making it any less wondrous. It is also honest about the limits of knowing. The speaker can "tell" the sunrise because she watched its consequences, but she must admit ignorance about the sunset, and what she offers in its place is an image rather than an explanation. That honesty keeps the poem from being merely pretty. Readers sometimes hear a quieter note in the closing lines, since a gray-clad figure leading the flock away can suggest an ending larger than one evening, but the poem never insists on it. Dickinson, whose poems mostly circulated privately rather than in print during her life, trusts the reader to notice, and the trust is part of the charm. The sun is the most overwhelming object in the sky, and she makes us see it by describing everything except the sun.