Dickinson sets a puzzle in the first line. "Vests" is an odd verb for Heaven to use. It means to clothe, but also to confer, as authority is "vested" in someone. Heaven dresses something "for Each" person "in that small Deity", and the idea seems to be that the infinite does not demand to be worshipped at full size. Every soul is given a god scaled to fit it, the one it "craved the grace to worship / Some bashful Summer's Day". "Bashful" suits the moment. The day is shy, and so is the worship: modest, private, not quite sure of itself. The poem never says what this small deity is, and a summer day itself is one possibility, but that is an inference rather than a statement.
The second stanza introduces a tension. The soul "importuned", begged and pestered, to see Glory, yet is "Half shrinking" from it, wanting and fearing in the same breath. The full sight is postponed "Till these faint Tabernacles drop / In full Eternity". A tabernacle is a tent or a portable sacred dwelling, so calling bodies "faint Tabernacles" makes them flimsy and temporary, pitched for a while and then struck. "Drop" is a plain, almost quiet word for death, like canvas falling. "Full" also answers the "small" of the first stanza. We are given the small deity now and the full Eternity later.
The third stanza is the hardest. The "Venture" is "imminent", something risky and close at hand, and it is compared to the act of one who would "sue a Star", to petition it, "For His mean sake to leave the Row / And entertain Despair". "Mean" means lowly, so the request is made on behalf of someone humble. The Row suggests a star's fixed place in an ordered line of heavenly bodies. To ask it to abandon that place and "entertain" despair, a verb that makes despair sound like a houseguest, is to ask something outrageous. Judging by the imagery, the star stands for the greater power being asked to stoop, and the stanza measures how large that favour is. A reader might hear an echo of divinity taking on human suffering, but the poem leaves that connection for us to make.
The last stanza turns toward the everyday. This "Clemency", or mercy, is "so common" that "We almost cease to fear". The word "almost" matters, because Dickinson will not let the fear vanish entirely. The mercy "Enabl[es] the minutest — / And furthest — to adore", meaning the tiniest and the most distant, and the dashes around those words hold them apart as if the distance were physical. The poem ends on "adore", so the smallness of the god and the lowliness of the worshipper come together as worship.
The form helps this meaning along. The four quatrains use short lines of six or seven syllables, close to the rhythm of a church hymn, which suits a poem about worship. Only the second and fourth lines of each stanza rhyme, and the rhymes are imperfect: Deity and Day, see and Eternity, Star and Despair, fear and adore. The last pair barely chimes, which mirrors the fear that never quite resolves. Each stanza ends on a dash, so the sentences feel left open, as if the thought continues past the page. The capitalised nouns (Heaven, Glory, Venture, Clemency) give abstractions the weight of monuments, while small words like "bashful" and "mean" keep them human.
The poem is significant because it takes an enormous question, how finite creatures can worship the infinite, and compresses it into sixteen short lines. It resists paraphrase, and the reader has to supply the links the syntax leaves out. It also offers no easy comfort. Mercy is real and generous, but it is so familiar that we risk taking it for granted, and the full glory stays hidden until the tent falls. The poem wonders at how Heaven makes itself small, and it keeps a little fear at the end.