Few prayers are as bold as this one, which packs a request, a reproach and a lesson into about a dozen words. The speaker calls on Jesus and asks that his own Crucifix "Enable thee to guess / The smaller size": the agony he knows from the cross should help him imagine the lesser agonies of ordinary people. The second stanza moves from the cross to the face. May "thy second face" remind him, once he is in Paradise, "Of ours!" The central idea is empathy running upward. Prayers normally ask God for mercy. This one hints that mercy depends on memory, and it worries, gently but pointedly, that comfort in heaven might make someone forget what suffering feels like.
The word "guess" does a lot of the work. Christ is traditionally all-knowing, yet the speaker offers him a verb that belongs to uncertainty. Making him guess brings him down to the human level, where nobody knows exactly how another person hurts. The word "size" does something similar. It comes from the language of clothes and shops, and it turns the most solemn event in Christianity into a matter of scale. His suffering is the large size, ours the "smaller." The comparison could sound like a put-down of human pain, but it works the other way. By assuming Christ can scale down from his own ordeal to ours, the speaker treats our pain as the same kind of thing, only smaller.
"Thy second face" is the poem's most open phrase, and it can be read several ways. It might mean the human face Christ wore on earth, as opposed to his divine one, or the face he showed in the Passion. Either way, the speaker wants a face that looks like ours to be present in Paradise. "Mind" seems to mean "remind," and "Enable" and "Mind" both lose the verb ending we would expect ("may thy Crucifix enable thee"). That leaves them sounding halfway between wish and command, so the speaker asks and orders at once. The two exclamations of "Jesus!" at the start of each stanza add to the tension. They are invocations, but they also sound like the startled cry of someone swearing, and the poem never settles which.
The structure carries the meaning as well. Each stanza has three lines and follows the same pattern. Two lines of about six syllables are followed by a short tail: "The smaller size!" has four syllables, and "Of ours!" shrinks to two. The poem therefore gets smaller as it goes, ending on a fragment that trails off without a verb. The form acts out the "smaller size" the poem talks about, and the last line seems to be the human side of the comparison, placed after all the divine grandeur of the Crucifix and Paradise.
The sound pattern is just as spare. The poem has one clear rhyme, "size" and "Paradise," which links the end of the first stanza to the heart of the second. It matters that these are the words joined. The smallness of human suffering and the vastness of heaven are set side by side, which fits the speaker's hope that the two can be held in one mind. Elsewhere the lines mostly avoid tidy matches, so the poem sounds abrupt and conversational, closer to a muttered challenge than a polished hymn verse.
Emily Dickinson lived in Amherst, Massachusetts, and most of her poems were published only after her death. Her short, compressed, uneasy poems are what make this piece typical of her, and the daring is a large part of its interest. Many poems address God with awe. This one speaks to him almost as an equal and sets him a task, to remember. Whether the speaker is bitter, tender or both is left for the reader to decide. What the poem does show is how much weight a few plain words can carry. "Guess," "size" and "ours" take in suffering, divinity and the distance between them, and in doing so ask whether a god who has suffered would remember what it was like.