Dickinson's tiny poem makes a huge statement about the nature of musing, day-dreaming, or as she puts it, "revery."
- To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
- One clover, and a bee,
- And revery.
- The revery alone will do,
- If bees are few.
Analysis
This little poem expresses Dickinson’s continuing love affair with the spiritual level of being. She begins by claiming that to make a physically large item, “a prairie,” all one needs is two small physical items, “a clover and one bee.”
Then she qualifies that by saying, “One clover, and a bee / And revery”; then she qualifies that claim further, by saying if you don’t have one of those physical components, “bees,” (and by implication, the clover as well), then you can still make the prairie by revery alone.
“Revery” means dream, thought, extended concentration on any subject, or even day-dreaming wherein the mind is allowed to roam free over the landscape of unlimited expansion, but to the speaker in this poem, “revery” is more like meditation which results in a true vision.
The speaker’s power of revery demonstrates an advanced achievement, far beyond ordinary day-dreaming or cogitation. Ultimately, this speaker is claiming that without any physical objects at all, the mind of one advanced in the art of revery can produce any object that mind desires.
Other Dickinson poems that focus on a similar themes are #632 “The Brain is wider than the sky,” #670 “One need not be a Chamber — to be Haunted,” #674 “The Soul that hath a Guest,” and many others.
