"A single Clover Plank" By Emily Dickinson [Analysis]

A single Clover Plank [1] Was all that saved a Bee [2] A Bee I personally knew [3] From sinking in the sky [4] 'Twixt Firmament above [5] And Firmament below [6] The Billows of Circumference [7] Were sweeping him away [8] The idly swaying Plank [9] Responsible to nought [10] A sudden Freight of Wind assumed [11] And Bumble Bee was not [12] This harrowing event [13] Transpiring in the Grass [14] Did not so much as wring from him [15] A wandering "Alas" [16]
Poem 1343 [F1297] "A single Clover Plank" Analysis by David Preest [Poem]

A bee seems to be injured. He is in danger of sinking (=dying) as he tries to fly, with the sky above and the earth below and the billows of circumferential air 'sweeping him away.' He is momentarily saved when a 'Clover Plank' gives him something to alight on, but then a sudden wind causes the clover to sway, and the bumble bee falls dead into the grass without even an 'Alas.' Paula Bennett thinks the poem is about Emily herself, as is suggested by lines 3- 4, and that she is describing the same situation as in poem 378, where she likewise found herself upon the circumference between this world and the next. If this is so, this poem is the gloomier of the two. In poem 378 the fate of the speaker when she went 'beyond the dip of Bell' is left unstated. In this poem the bee dies with no hope of reaching the firmament of the sky above.
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