Counting snowflakes in a storm is a hopeless job, and Emily Dickinson's poem is the story of how the attempt falls apart. The speaker begins as a careful observer, tallying the flakes until they "danced so / Their slippers leaped the town." She reaches for a pencil "to note the rebels down," as if she were taking names in a classroom. The flakes only get "jolly," and she gives up: "I did resign the prig." The poem ends with her own toes "marshalled for a jig!" Its central idea is that the urge to measure and control nature gives way to the pull of play. The watcher gets swept into the scene she meant to record.
The imagery holds to one metaphor. Apart from the bare title, the poem never mentions snow again. The flakes are dancers, and the "slippers" are a clever choice, since slippers are light and soft and make no noise, like snow itself. The phrase "leaped the town" shifts the scale. Tiny flakes become figures big enough to jump a whole town, which suggests how completely a snowfall covers a place.
The most interesting language is the vocabulary of order and authority, which the poem keeps turning against itself. The speaker "counted," took a "pencil," and wanted to "note" things "down." The flakes are "rebels," so she casts herself as a clerk or officer. Then the vocabulary flips. Her toes were "once stately," and now they are "marshalled," a military word used for a jig. The rebels have drafted the officer. There is also a quiet joke in the numbers. She gives up counting flakes, but the last thing counted is "ten" toes, so she is still counting after all, only now she is the one being counted and commanded. Calling herself a "prig" is self-mockery. She is laughing at her own prim seriousness while giving it up.
The form suits this loosening. The poem is a single eight-line stanza, and the lines alternate between longer ones of about eight syllables and shorter ones of about six. The rhythm is bouncy and close to a ballad or hymn, which Dickinson often used. The rhyme comes only on every second line: "town" with "down," "prig" with "jig." The odd lines ("so," "pencil," "jolly," "toes") are left unrhymed, so the sound moves like a step followed by a pause. Lines three and five end on soft two-syllable words, "pencil" and "jolly," which make the rhythm trip a little. The repeated "And then," at the start of lines three and five and echoed by a plain "And" in line seven, gives the breathless feel of a child telling a story, with one event tumbling after another.
The pairing of "prig" and "jig" may be the neatest sound effect. A stuffy word and a lively word end up sharing a rhyme, so the sound itself seems to turn one into the other. "Jolly" and "jig" also share the hard *j*, which gives the final lines a kick. The poem's only exclamation mark falls on the last word, like a dancer's final leap.
Dickinson lived in Amherst, Massachusetts, and wrote nearly 1,800 poems, only a few of which appeared in print during her lifetime. Many of them are compressed and solemn, and her rhymes are often only approximate. Here the rhymes are plain and the mood is comic, which is part of what makes the poem worth reading. It shows that she could be funny. It also fits a whole argument into eight lines, that nature will not stay still long enough to be tallied, and that the better response to it may be to join in. The speaker does not lose by giving in. Her only loss is her dignity, and the poem presents that as a gain.