A butterfly gets dressed, steps out for the afternoon, and goes visiting. That is the whole plot of Emily Dickinson's six-line poem, yet it manages to turn a garden scene into something close to a small piece of theology with a sense of humor. The gown has hung in jewel-green rooms "In Chrysoprase Apartments," and "This afternoon" it is "put on." The butterfly then does something unexpected for a creature dressed so grandly: it comes down to be "of Buttercups the friend / In a New England Town." The central idea is that splendor is not diminished by humility, and that the heavenly feels at home among the most ordinary things.
The vocabulary tells you how grand the occasion is supposed to be. "Assumption" recalls the Assumption of the Virgin Mary into heaven, so this is a gown for rising, not for lounging in a meadow. "Chrysoprase" is a green gemstone, and the word also appears among the jewels of the heavenly city in the Book of Revelation. The sky, in other words, is a gem-lined residence. But Dickinson then makes it faintly comic with "Apartments" and "hung," as though paradise had closets and the butterfly had gone to one for something to wear. Sacred language and household language sit side by side, and neither wins.
The poem's best moment is its pun: "How condescending to descend." The two verbs are nearly the same word, one meaning to stoop socially and the other to move downward, and saying them together makes the line slide pleasantly off the tongue. The butterfly is imagined as a lofty visitor lowering itself to a lower class of company. Yet the next line undoes that snobbery by calling the visitor a "friend." The tone is hard to pin down. The speaker seems to admire the butterfly and tease it at once, as if applauding a duchess for being willing to chat with the neighbors. Buttercups help the effect. The name is plain and slightly childlike, and it contrasts with the long, Latinate "Assumption," "Chrysoprase," and "condescending." Notice that the poem ends on short, blunt words: "friend," "Town."
The construction supports this movement from high to low. Each three-line stanza follows the same shape of two longer lines of eight syllables and a short line of six, so the poem feels like a compressed hymn or ballad, ending each stanza a beat early. The rhymes work in a curious way. "Descend" and "friend" rhyme cleanly, but the strongest link in the poem runs between its first and last line: "Gown" and "Town." Those two words are almost identical in sound, and the poem is, in effect, the distance between them. Meanwhile "hung" and "on" echo each other only faintly, ending on the same consonant but with different vowels, which leaves the first stanza slightly unresolved.
The syntax adds to this suspense. The first stanza is one long, inverted sentence in which the gown comes first, then its location, and only at the end the action: "put on." The butterfly itself appears only as a possessive in the title phrase, so the gown seems almost to dress itself. The second stanza breaks into an exclamation, as though the speaker could not hold back the pun any longer. The poem also ends on a dash rather than a full stop, a mark that is characteristic of Dickinson's manuscripts and here leaves the visit open-ended.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it fits into so little space. A butterfly's emergence from its cocoon can suggest rebirth, and the poem's religious vocabulary seems to invite that reading, though it never says so outright. What it does say is more surprising. The grandest outfit imaginable is worn not to leave the world but to visit it, and the destination is not a city of jewels but "a New England Town," a place much like the one where Dickinson herself spent her life. By capitalizing "New England Town" as if it were a place of importance, the poem implies that it is one.