Emily Dickinson’s “When I count the seeds”
In “When I count the seeds,” Emily Dickinson’s speaker is contemplating her spiritual garden, wherein she plants and grows the metaphorical seeds for her poems. She introduced this garden in the poem, “There is another sky.”
Introduction and Text of “When I count the seeds”
In her poem, “There is another sky,” Emily Dickinson creates a speaker who introduces her own spiritual, mystical garden, the second poem featured in Editor Thomas Johnson’s The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, the volume in which Johnson presents Dickinson’s original forms, rescuing them from the versions that had been manipulated and altered by editors such as Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Higginson.
In “When I count the seeds,” the speaker is musing on the nature of her spiritual garden of verse and ultimately concludes its importance for her. After such mental forays into the blessed garden, her beloved, favorite season, “summer,” she can leave without trepidation.
The form of the poem is structured on three “when” clauses, after which the speaker makes the claim that something happens following the activities in the clauses. Because of the vague nature of the adverbial conjunction, “when,” one should think of its meaning as “after.” It is after each of the events in the “when” clauses that the last line’s activity becomes possible.
When I count the seeds
When I count the seeds
That are sown beneath,
To bloom so, bye and bye –
When I con the people
Lain so low,
To be received as high –
When I believe the garden
Mortal shall not see –
Pick by faith its blossom
And avoid its Bee,
I can spare this summer, unreluctantly.
Commentary on “When I count the seeds”
Each “when” clause features an event, after the sum of which the speaker becomes relieved of the human trepidation of regret at losing some desired situation. In this case, it is simply the passing of summer.
The speaker feels a certain melancholy at the end of the summer season. That emotion presents a problem that she must solve, lest she remain in blue funk. Her wide brain is up to the task, as she storms her garden of verse for the answer to the difficulty.
First Stanza: Taking Stock
When I count the seeds
That are sown beneath,
To bloom so, bye and bye –
From time to time, the speaker takes stock of her little garden. In this musing, she begins by implying that something will occur after she has “count[ed] the seeds.” She reports that the seeds once planted beneath the soil in the spiritual garden, they do, as any seed will, bloom, as time goes by.
An interesting tension results because “the seeds” are the ideas, thoughts, and/or prompts for each poem in her spiritually effected garden. After each idea or thought or prompt has been sown, it will blossom forth into a perfect flower-poem. In time, she has found that she possesses many seeds as well as flowers to be reckoned with.
The term “count” is employed metaphorically to stand as “reckon,” “contemplate,” or more likely even, “muse,” rather than the literal, mathematical rendering of the term’s definition. She is not counting to find out how many seeds she has; she is musing on the lot for the glory of outcome they possess.
Second Stanza: Continuing to Contemplate
When I con the people
Lain so low,
To be received as high –
The second “when” clause addresses the time-frame wherein the speaker has contemplated folks who have been demoted from high station to low but likely still remain held in high regard to many others. Some folks have died, and yet their reputations have been elevated.
The speaker’s reason for musing on this situation likely ascends out of a need to place evaluations on the stages of life. To be placed “so low” metaphorically responds to being placed in the lowest position the human body may find itself, that is, in the bottom of a grave.
Yet, the generality of the phrase “so low” remains easily understood as position in life from a lowly profession to a high one, for example, a dog catcher to a president or CEO. After such cogitation on the seeds of her spiritual garden and then on the various degrees of humanity, the speaker is almost ready to assert her report about what happens next.
Third Stanza: Achievement of Purpose
When I believe the garden
Mortal shall not see –
Pick by faith its blossom
And avoid its Bee,
I can spare this summer, unreluctantly.
In the final “when” clause, the speaker is asserting that after she has had the opportunity to survey the marvelous, mystical garden, which may not be perceived through “mortal” vision, her faith allows her to pluck any of the garden’s magic blossoms.
And then she can re-experience any of the poems which have thus far been cultivated therein without attracting the painful attention of the worrisome sting of “its Bee,” a natural creature that would bedevil any literal garden.
So after she has contemplated the seeds (thoughts, feelings), which have led to sprouting those flowers (poems), and after she has mused on the nature of human status, and finally after she has plucked (read) one of those “blossom[s]” (poems), she can recover from feeling any sorrow and regret that her beloved, favorite season of summer is now coming to a close.
The little drama featured in this poem remains so simple, yet through the instrumentality of the complex talent possessed by the poet, the resulting discourse features a colorful, strikingly refreshing account that reveals the nature of profound, intuitive thinking.
The poet possessed virtually magical powers of seeing deep into the nature of each created object, into each empirical development, and into each observable array of kinetic energy that infused those things and events.
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