Dickinson fits a whole emotional history into eight short lines, and the key lies in two words at either end of the first stanza: "paused" and "sentence." A pause is temporary, while a sentence, in the legal sense, is a term to be served. Between those words the speaker's summer slides from an interruption into a verdict.
Summer here stands for fullness: warmth, growth, whatever happiness the speaker once had. "'Twas here my summer paused" pins that loss to a spot, as if she could point to it on a map. The next line, "What ripeness after then," carries no question mark in this text, but it works as a question. Ripeness is what summer exists to produce, so if summer stops, where could fulfilment come from? The third and fourth lines are knotted: "To other scene or other soul / My sentence had begun." The grammar won't settle. Perhaps ripeness may still come to other places and other people, while for her a sentence has begun. Perhaps the sentence was passed in connection with some other scene or soul. The repeated "other" does one thing clearly, though. It makes the world feel busy and fertile somewhere else, out of her reach. And "sentence" is also a grammatical word, a run of language that ends in a full stop, which sits neatly beside "paused."
The second stanza turns from loss to residence. "To winter to remove / With winter to abide" is built from two matching phrases, but the verbs differ. "Remove" is a journey and "abide" is staying put. The speaker does not visit winter. She moves in and settles down. The doubled "winter" also has a dull, wintry sameness, like the season itself.
Then the voice snaps. "Go manacle your icicle / Against your Tropic Bride" is an order, and it is bitter, almost sneering. The poem never says who "you" is, so the reading is open. One possibility, and this is an inference from the imagery, is someone who has moved on to warmth, with a "Tropic Bride" as the new partner. Another is that the speaker addresses winter itself. Either way the image is odd and sharp. An icicle is brittle and bound to melt, so chaining it against a tropical bride is absurd. The line can be taken as a curse (go and bring your cold to her) or as a taunt (your cold won't last there). The capital letters on "Tropic" and "Bride" make them feel like personified figures in a small allegory.
The form helps this swerve in tone. Both stanzas follow a 6-6-8-6 syllable pattern, the shape hymn writers call short metre, and the lines are mostly iambic. "'Twas HERE my SUMmer PAUSED" is a clean example. The hymn-like shape gives a sense of solemn order, but the poem keeps cutting against it. The third line of each stanza stretches out, with "other scene or other soul" and "manacle your icicle," and then the fourth line drops short, like a gavel. The rhyme is just as sparing. Only the second and fourth lines of each stanza are linked. In the first stanza "then" and "begun" share only a faint echo, which is a slant rhyme. In the second, "abide" and "Bride" finally chime fully, and the poem's one clean rhyme lands on the word "Bride." It places the one who stays with winter beside the one who gets a wedding.
What makes the poem memorable is that it avoids the usual melancholy about seasons. There is no weeping and no lingering over fading leaves. Dickinson mixes the vocabularies of fruit (ripeness), law (sentence), travel (remove) and marriage (Bride), and the clash of these registers lets the reader feel an emotion the speaker never names. The poem begins in near-resignation, with summer simply stopping, and ends in scorn. The change is quick, and it suggests that the "sentence" has not entirely silenced the person serving it.