Dickinson opens with a comparison that seems to trail off before it lands. "Summer is shorter than any one" leaves us asking: any one what? The poem never says, and the vagueness helps. Summer, the season we picture as long and golden, is made to feel briefer than anything we could name. The next line tightens the screw: "Life is shorter than Summer." It works like a small logical staircase. If summer is shorter than everything, and life is shorter than summer, then the thing we are living is the shortest thing of all.
Dickinson then turns to money. "Seventy Years is spent / As quick / As an only Dollar." Seventy years is a long life by most measures, but the verb "spent" turns it into currency, and the grammar helps. She writes "Years is," treating the whole span as one lump sum rather than a string of separate years. "An only Dollar" is a strange phrase too. It suggests a single, last coin, but also a mere one, and anyone holding just one dollar knows how fast it goes. The plain, everyday word deflates the grand subject, so mortality is shrunk to the size of something you could lose between a counter and a pocket.
The form supports this smallness. By my count the lines run from about six to eight syllables, so none of them gets room to sprawl. The first stanza has no true end rhyme, only a faint echo between the unstressed endings of "Summer" and "Dollar." In the second stanza the second and fourth lines both end on "him," so the rhyme comes from repetition rather than from matching sounds. It sounds almost like a shrug. And the dashes do a great deal of work. In "Sorrow -- now -- is polite -- and stays --" they chop the line into four separate beats, as if the speaker were pausing to watch Sorrow settle into the chair.
That line is where the poem changes subject, from how short life is to what we do with it. Sorrow is a personified guest, and "polite" is a sly choice. A rude visitor can be thrown out, but a polite one lingers quietly, and that is why he is hard to get rid of. "See how well we spurn him" is sarcastic. We are brilliant at rejecting Sorrow, and he is still sitting there. Short life, long sorrow: the arithmetic of the first stanza makes this feel like a bad bargain.
The last two lines are the trickiest. "Equally to abhor Delight -- / Equally retain him --" has slippery syntax. "Him" could mean Sorrow or Delight, and "equally" could mean we treat the two alike or that we do both things at once. One possible reading is that we push Delight away as hard as we push Sorrow, perhaps because joy is so brief that it hurts to hold, and yet we cannot help keeping hold of them. The poem refuses to settle, and the confusion seems to be the point. Our feelings do not sort themselves into the ones we want and the ones we don't.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it fits into eight short lines. Dickinson, who lived in Amherst, Massachusetts, often gave abstractions the manners of people, and here the capital letters on Sorrow and Delight make them feel like acquaintances we have to deal with. The two stanzas also fit together as a kind of household accounts. The first tells us how little time we have to spend, and the second shows us spending it badly, on a guest who overstays. The poem never tells us how to feel about this. It sets out the sums and leaves the reader to add them up.