Dickinson starts in a garden and ends among the galaxies, and the climb between the two is the whole argument. The opening question, "If the foolish, call them 'flowers' -- / Need the wiser, tell?", sounds like a shrug. Why correct a plain word? If the "Savants" want to "Classify" the same blooms, "It is just as well!" The exclamation is breezy, almost teasing. The casual namer and the learned sorter are both doing something harmless, and, the poem goes on to suggest, something small.
The second stanza moves from plants to scripture. Readers of the "Revelations" are told not to criticize those who read "the same Edition -- / With beclouded Eyes!" The joke is in "same Edition." People quarrel over meaning while holding identical books, and nobody sees clearly. The phrase "beclouded Eyes" calls to mind Paul's "through a glass, darkly," and it makes the point that the critic's eyesight is no better than the person being criticized.
Then comes Moses, who in the biblical story was allowed to see the promised land but not enter it. Dickinson asks us to stand beside him and "Scan like him, the stately landscape / On the other side." Judging by the imagery, "the other side" is the world beyond death. From that vantage point, she says, "we should deem superfluous / Many Sciences, / Not pursued by learned Angels / In scholastic skies!" The picture is funny: heaven as a university where the faculty have quietly dropped botany. Even the sound plays along. "Sciences" and "scholastic skies" hiss against each other, and the rhyme between "Sciences" and "skies" is only approximate, as if the learning is already losing its grip. The verb is also careful. We "should deem" these studies superfluous. That describes how things would look from a higher place, and it does not claim the studies are worthless.
The last stanza turns into a prayer. "Grant that we may stand," the speaker asks, "Low amid that glad Belles lettres," and then the scale swells again: "Stars, amid profound Galaxies -- / At that grand 'Right hand'!" The speaker is humble ("Low") and ambitious (a star, at the place of honor) in the same breath. The tone stays light, though. "Belles lettres," a polite term for fine literature, makes the afterlife sound like a pleasant literary society.
The poem's shape follows its idea. Each stanza lifts the camera higher: flower, book, mountain, sky, galaxy. The form is five quatrains with a hymn-like lilt. Longer lines of seven or eight syllables alternate with short ones of about five, and the stresses fall in a clipped, falling pattern ("IF the FOOL-ish, CALL them FLOW-ers"). Only the second and fourth lines of each stanza rhyme: tell/well, criticize/Eyes, denied/side, stand/hand. The short lines land like small verdicts. Dickinson's habits of punctuation do a lot of work here too. Her dashes leave thoughts hanging open, and her capitals (Savants, Edition, Angels, Galaxies) turn common nouns into grand-sounding titles. The quotation marks may be the most interesting device. "Flowers," "Classify," "Revelations," "Moses," "Canaan" and finally "Right hand" are all held up as borrowed words. Even the language of heaven is a label that someone else coined, so the poem puts the sacred vocabulary on the same footing as the botanist's and the foolish person's.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. It does not attack science or religion. It gently deflates the pride of both, and it does so with wit rather than anger. The speaker doesn't claim to know what lies on the other side, and the verbs stay conditional ("Could we," "we should deem," "Grant that"). What she offers is a change of scale. Next to what Moses glimpsed, arguments over names and editions look small, and the wish to be one star among many looks almost modest.