Most poems about childhood either mourn it or pat it on the head. Dickinson does something stranger: she makes the child a monarch, then shows how the crown is quietly taken away. In twenty-four lines she follows one kind of belief from its brilliant beginning to its sober end, and the closing note is less tragedy than bookkeeping.
The first stanza describes faith that has never been tested. It is "Whole," "Wide," and "Never had a Doubt." The best image is "the Sunrise / On fresh Eyes." The width belongs to the eyes that receive the light, so the child's faith is less a doctrine than a way of seeing. Even conscience gets brushed aside: the child "Laughs -- at a Scruple," and since a scruple is both a pang of conscience and a tiny unit of weight, the laughter dismisses something doubly small. The stanza ends on its most puzzling claim, that the child "Believes all sham / But Paradise." It can be read two ways: the child distrusts everything except heaven, or the child finds the world itself so bright that nothing counts as fake. The next stanza, where the child "Credits the World," leans toward the second reading, though the poem never settles it.
That stanza borrows its vocabulary from money and politics. "Credits" means both believes and lends, as if trust were an account the child opens without checking the bank. "Deems," "Dominion," "Sovereignties," and "Comparison" make the child a ruler surveying a realm, and the superlative "Broadest" puts him above even Caesar, who is "mean" (petty) beside him. The sentence about the "Baseless Emperor" is ambiguous. He may be the child, who rules nothing and "yet" sways everyone around him, or Caesar, whose grandeur is just as groundless. Either way, power with no foundation is the stanza's real subject, and the child's version is at least innocent.
The third stanza turns, and the grammar turns with it. "Grown bye and bye" has a folksy, nursery-rhyme ease that makes what follows more unsettling. The grown child learns "To hold mistaken / His pretty estimates / Of Prickly Things." "Estimates" continues the language of valuation, so disillusion becomes a correction of figures. "Prickly Things" suggests that what the child thought lovely had thorns all along. What he gains is called a "skill," a word that sounds like an achievement, yet it is "Sorrowful -- as certain." The dashes hold those two qualities side by side without choosing between them. The skill is "Men -- to anticipate / Instead of Kings." The adult expects ordinary, fallible people where the child expected royalty. "Anticipate" can mean to expect or to guard against, and both senses fit.
The sound of the poem supports this. The lines are short, usually two or three beats, and the dashes chop them into hesitant pieces, as if the speaker were weighing each word. Rhyme is sparse and often slant: "Sunrise," "Eyes," and "Paradise" chime in the first stanza, while "Principle" and "Scruple" and "Dominion" and "Comparison" only half-match. The one clean rhyme in the last stanza, "Things" and "Kings," is the most telling. It sets the two words in the same sound, so that the kings of childhood are exactly the prickly things of adulthood. The poem also ends with no full stop, on "Kings," as though the loss were still going on.
Dickinson spent her life in Amherst, Massachusetts, and saw very few poems printed while she lived. This one shows the habits that made her distinctive: capitalised nouns, dashes in place of conventional punctuation, and large ideas packed into small spaces. Its significance lies in its refusal to be sentimental. It does not claim that childhood faith is simply right, since the child is an emperor of "Nought," and it does not claim that adult realism is simply wise, since the skill it names is sorrowful. Instead it lets the reader feel the exchange, with all its gain and cost, in the space of a single stanza.