Comfort is easy to offer and very hard to accept, and Dickinson's five-line poem lives in the gap between the two. A speaker addresses people in the middle of pain (the poem never says what kind) and tells them what time will do. It "does go on," they "shall survive," and "there is a sun." The last line then deflates the whole speech: the sufferers "don't believe it now." The central idea is that a true consolation can still be useless at the moment it is given, because suffering makes any future hard to picture. The speaker knows this and speaks anyway.
The most intriguing word is "gay." Today it needs translating. In Dickinson's day it meant cheerful, bright. "I tell it gay" is also an unusual construction, since the adjective stands where grammar would expect "gaily." The cheerfulness comes across less as a feeling than as a tone of voice, almost a costume put on for the occasion. Is the speaker truly light-hearted, or choosing brightness because it is the only way to deliver such news? The poem doesn't say, and that uncertainty is part of its appeal. Notice, too, that the speaker "tell[s]" it. She doesn't say "I know it" or "I feel it." Telling is an act aimed at other people, and the poem ends by showing that the act may fall short of its target.
The form is tiny, and its lines are uneven. Most are short and clipped: "Time does go on," "They shall survive," "There is a sun." Each is a flat declaration, as if the speaker were reciting facts rather than arguing. The one long line, "I tell it gay to those who suffer now," is where the speaker steps into the poem and the sufferers appear. It is the only line with room to breathe, and it is about the relationship between the speaker and the people she is trying to reach. There is no regular rhyme scheme. The nearest thing to a rhyme is "now" closing lines two and five, a word rhyming with itself. "Time" and "survive" share a faint long-i echo, while "sun" stands unrhymed. Every line also ends in a dash, so nothing is ever closed off with a full stop. The dashes work like pauses after each claim, as though the speaker waits to see whether it has been believed. After the final dash the silence goes unanswered.
The poem has only one image, and it is stripped bare. "There is a sun" is not "the sun will rise" or "morning is coming." The verb is in the present tense, a statement that the sun exists, with no dawn, warmth or metaphor attached. Readers can supply the usual associations of light after darkness, and judging by the grammar, the point seems to be that the sun is there whether or not the sufferers can see it. "Shall survive" works in a similar way. "Shall" is firmer than "will," closer to a promise than a prediction.
The word "now" frames the speech. The sufferers are described as suffering "now," and at the end they disbelieve "now." The speaker's reassurance is sandwiched between two presents, with the future she describes trapped in the middle. That is the poem's quiet cruelty. Her message is about time passing, but the people she addresses are stuck in a moment that feels as if it will never end.
What makes the poem significant is its honesty in so small a space. Dickinson, an American poet from Amherst, Massachusetts, left close to eighteen hundred poems, most of them unpublished in her lifetime, and this one shows how much she could do with a handful of words and dashes. It could have ended on triumph, with the sun rising and the sufferers convinced. Instead it ends on their doubt, and it lets that doubt stand. The poem knows that "it gets better" is true and also that it sounds hollow to someone in pain, and it holds both ideas without choosing between them. Anyone who has been offered comfort they couldn't yet use, or has offered it themselves, will recognize the scene.