Four short lines, and Emily Dickinson has turned the whole natural world into a slightly chaotic household. The speaker reasons like a friendly neighbour over a garden fence. If Nature is smiling, then the Mother must be smiling too, and with good reason, given "many a whim / Of Her eccentric Family." The last line, "Is She so much to blame?", is half defence and half shrug. Anyone who has watched a parent cope with unruly children will recognise the tone.
The poem never says who the Mother is. Nature and the Mother may be one figure, a single indulgent parent. Or Nature may be one of the household, smiling at its own antics while the Mother looks on. The capital letters on "Her" and "She" lift the Mother toward something grander, yet what she is asked to do is put up with her relatives. The effect is comic deflation: a mighty figure reduced to a mother who has given up expecting her children to behave. One reading is that the "eccentric Family" is every odd, unpredictable thing in the natural world. Another is that it includes human beings, whims and all.
The poem's construction is neat but not tidy. Its lines alternate between eight and six syllables, in a rhythm close to the hymn pattern Dickinson often borrowed. That pattern is familiar from church singing, and it gives the poem a calm, sing-song surface. The rhyme is another matter. "Whim" and "blame" share only their final *m*, a near-rhyme that almost lands and doesn't quite. The first and third lines, ending in "must" and "Family," do not rhyme at all. You could argue that the sound is a little eccentric too, a regular frame with the edges slightly off. That is my inference from the sounds, not something the poem announces.
Some of the best effects come from what is left out. The first line ends on "the Mother must," and the verb is never supplied. We have to fill in "smile" ourselves from the first half of the sentence, which makes us small accomplices in the joke. "Must" also carries a double sense. It is a logical conclusion ("she must be smiling"), but it also suggests she has no choice, as if smiling were all a mother can do about such a family.
The dashes, Dickinson's well-known habit, work as hinges. The one after "smiles" separates the condition from its consequence. The one after "Family" leaves a beat of silence before the question arrives, like a speaker pausing to let a point sink in. The interjected "I'm sure" gives the speaker a confiding, slightly gossipy voice. She sounds as though she is sharing an opinion rather than delivering a verdict.
The vocabulary adds to the comedy. "Whim" and "Family" are small, homely words, and "eccentric" is polished and rather formal. Its root meaning is "off-centre," which fits creatures that wander away from where they are supposed to be. Set beside the plain words, it sounds like a diplomatic label for behaviour too odd to describe more bluntly. And "smiles" is a bold choice for Nature. It gives landscape and weather a face, and an affectionate one.
The final question is where the poem becomes more than a joke. "Is She so much to blame?" invites us to think about responsibility. If the world is a household of odd, wilful members, who answers for its strangeness? The poem seems to suggest that you cannot blame a mother for everything her family does. Judging by the wording, though, it does not settle the matter. A question mark is a lighter way of raising a heavy issue than a solemn argument would be, and the poem stays light enough to be charming.
The poem matters because of how much it does in so little space. Dickinson wrote in Amherst, Massachusetts, and her short, compressed poems, with their dashes and capitalised nouns, are among the most recognisable in American literature. This quatrain shows her typical qualities in miniature: wit, a hymn-like form quietly bent out of shape, and a habit of approaching large questions about nature and blame from a sideways, playful angle. It asks for a smile first and then, a moment later, a little thought.