Emily Dickinson’s poem “I’ll tell you how the Sun rose” (#318 in Johnson, which differs primarily in punctuation and spacing from the Bartleby version) consists of sixteen lines, featuring her signature slant rimes and a generous sprinkling of dashes.
The poem is written as one piece but divides itself topically into four quatrains. The first two quatrains describe how the sun came up on the particular morning of the speaker’s choosing, while in the second two quatrains, the speaker actually dramatizes why she cannot explain how the sun set.
First Quatrain: “I'll tell you how the Sun rose”
The speaker begins by asserting that she is going to tell her audience “how the Sun rose.” The speaker metaphorically compares the sun’s rays to ribbons that are let loose one at a time.
The colorful rays slowly unravel as over the ocean where the church steeples seem to “sw[i]m in Amethyst.” As the bright fire of the sun appears, the darkened blackness first turns blue, before taking on its brightness in the full glow of the sun.
Then suddenly the sun’s appearance spreads quickly: the speaker likens it to the spreading of “news” that runs “like Squirrels.”
Second Quatrain: “The Hills untied their Bonnets”
The speaker then reports, “[t]he Hills untied their Bonnets — / The Bobolinks — begun.” All of nature is waking up and color can be seen as far away as the hills, while the birds have started to sing.
The speaker then reports that in her surprised musing, she utters to herself, “That must have been the Sun”! It is as if she was seeing it for the first time and marveling at the effect the mere rising of the sun has had on all that she sees. She must liken the event to common things she knows in order to make such a report.
Third Quatrain: “But how he set — I know not”
The speaker seems to imagine her location closer to the sunrise than to the sunset, which is, of course, not literally true, but her little drama depends on this little fiction. Even though she cannot “know” for sure how the sun set, she can imagine and report what she thinks she sees.
It seemed to her that as the sun set, she saw “a purple stile” where “little Yellow boy and girls were climbing.” She sees children in China probably climbing over a barrier, possibly going home after a day of tending sheep or perhaps simply on their way home from school.
Fourth Quatrain: “Till when they reached the other side”
After climbing the stile, the children finally reach the other side, which heralds the lowest point of the sun before it disappears. And what causes the sun to finally disappear is that a cleric or perhaps even a householder shepherd closes a gate and leads away the flock of children or perhaps sheep. At this point, the speaker would be in darkness and have no idea what happens next.
The uncertainty of the how the sun set causes the speaker’s language choices to be tentative, not as certain as she was about how the sun rose.
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