Dickinson begins with a comparison that has nothing to compare. "As if some little Arctic flower": as if what? The first eight lines form a single hypothetical that never reaches a main clause, so we are dropped into a daydream before we know what it illustrates. The story is simple. A tiny plant from the frozen north wanders "down the Latitudes" and arrives somewhere impossibly lush, among "continents of summer," "firmaments of sun," "strange, bright crowds of flowers" and birds "of foreign tongue." Then the speaker steps in, restates the idea with the flower now wandering into "Eden," and asks what it all means. The answer is "Why nothing, / Only, your inference therefrom!" The central idea is that the meaning is not delivered. It is handed to the reader.
The imagery works on a contrast of scale. The flower is "little," while everything it meets is vast: continents, firmaments, crowds. Even the starting point is oddly intimate, since the "polar hem" makes the top of the world sound like the edge of a garment, with the flower growing on its border. The flower is also given a mind. It is "puzzled," and the inverted phrase "Until it puzzled came" makes the line stumble as if the flower were stopping to take stock. Nothing in the poem says why it travels, only that it "wandered." That gives it an innocence, an outsider drifting into a place it has no map for. The birds' "foreign tongue" adds to this. The newcomer cannot even understand the welcome.
The sound of the poem supports that mood. Longer and shorter lines alternate, a pattern close to a hymn or ballad, but it is never rigid. The rhymes are loose in the same way. "Hem" and "came" share only their final consonant, "sun" and "tongue" rhyme fully, and "in" and "therefrom" barely echo each other. By the end the poem's music has almost dissolved, just as its explanation does. The dashes at the line ends act like small pauses for breath, and the single exclamation mark, after "tongue!", is the one moment of open wonder before the speaker turns to address us.
That turn is the real hinge. "I say, As if this little flower / To Eden, wandered in" shifts the poem from geography to myth. Up to now we could picture a map, with Arctic at the top and tropics below. "Eden" lifts the scene into something larger. The poem nudges us toward reading the flower as any small, unlikely creature admitted to a place of overwhelming abundance, perhaps a soul arriving in paradise. That is an inference, though, and the poem will not confirm it. Its tone also changes. "What then? Why nothing" sounds like a shrug, but it is a teasing one. The stiff, almost legal word "therefrom" makes the speaker sound like someone mock-formally refusing to testify, while clearly enjoying the suspense.
What makes the poem significant is how openly it hands over its own interpretation. Many poems hide their meaning and make us dig. This one points at the gap and says it is ours to fill. Even the speaker is only supposing, since every sentence is an "as if." So whatever we conclude, whether it is about death, belonging, or the shock of arriving somewhere better than we expected, partly reveals what we brought with us. Dickinson's compressed, dash-broken style suits this well, because it leaves room for the reader. The little flower is bewildered by the bright world it enters, and the reader is left in a similar position, holding a riddle and a pleasant sense of being trusted with it.