Eight short lines, and already a puzzle: how do you fasten anything permanently with a flower? Dickinson sets the softest things she can name, "a flower," "a letter," "a nimble love," beside the hardest labour of a blacksmith's shop. The speaker imagines welding a rivet, and what she wants held is "Final fast -- above --." Heaven is the obvious reading of "above," though the poem never says so. Judging by the imagery, the rivet joins her to something higher and lasting, and small gestures of affection are the tools that do the joining.
The wordplay is where the poem gets its force. "By" can mean "by means of" or simply "alongside," so the opening line is open-ended from the start. "Fast" works two ways. In "weld the Rivet faster" it suggests both more quickly and more firmly, but by the time we reach "Final fast" only the second sense survives: fixed for good. The grammar is just as unusual. The sentence begins "If I weld the Rivet faster" and never reaches a main clause. Instead of a result, the second stanza gives a dismissal. The logic seems to be that if these tender means can secure the prize, nothing else matters.
That dismissal arrives as a triple hammer-blow: "Never mind... Never mind... Never mind." What is waved away is the cost. The "breathless Anvil" is a neat transfer, since anvils do not breathe and the exhaustion belongs to the worker, yet it makes the whole workshop seem to pant. "Repose" rejects rest and ease, and it may also hint at a final rest, though that is an inference. Then come the "sooty faces / Tugging at the Forge," the only people in the poem. The text does not say who they are. They might be fellow labourers working the fire, or a picture of the speaker's own toil seen from outside. Either way, soot and fire make a deliberate contrast with the clean height of "above."
The sound supports the sense. Dickinson often writes in a hymn-like rhythm that rises from unstressed to stressed syllables, but here the stress falls first: FLOWer, LETter, NEVer MIND. The lines alternate between about seven or eight syllables and five, so each long strike is followed by a short, ringing pause, like a hammer and its echo. The dashes at the end of every line in the first stanza work like held breaths between blows, leaving each phrase hanging. The capitals on Rivet, Anvil, Repose and Forge turn tools and states of mind into solid, almost emblematic objects.
Rhyme is used sparingly and to effect. "Love" and "above" is a true rhyme, and it closes the first stanza by locking the tender word to the heavenly one. In the second stanza "Repose" and "Forge" do not chime at all, and the poem ends on the harsh, unresolved noise of the forge. The punctuation changes too. The first stanza moves through dashes, as if the speaker is thinking aloud, while the second turns to exclamation marks. The voice grows defiant and has stopped asking whether the effort is worth it.
What makes the poem memorable is how much it packs into so little space. It says that tenderness is not the easy option, and that a flower or a letter, the most ordinary of gifts, can cost as much breath as iron-work. It also refuses to explain itself, leaving the reader to decide what the rivet holds and what lies "above." That compression is typical of Dickinson, who lived in Amherst, Massachusetts, and saw very few of her poems printed in her lifetime. Most reached readers only after her death in 1886. Here it leaves a clear and slightly startling picture of love as work, done with a hammer in hand.