If She Had Been The Mistletoe - Analysis

A love wish that turns into a gift

The poem begins as a bright, almost playful daydream—then pivots into a small act of renunciation. Dickinson’s central move is: she imagines a perfect, intimate pairing (she as mistletoe, I as rose), but ends by choosing to be an ornament of Tradition instead, sending the rose outward rather than keeping it. The speaker wants closeness, yet she also accepts (or enforces) a rule that redirects desire into something decorative and socially legible.

Mistletoe and rose: a fantasy of sanctioned closeness

If she had been the Mistletoe / And I had been the Rose sets up two plants with very different cultural jobs. Mistletoe carries a public permission for intimacy—an excuse to kiss—while the rose is private emblem: soft, fragrant, associated with love itself. In the imagined scene, the speaker’s velvet life would close upon your table, an image that makes devotion both tactile and domestic, like a centerpiece meant to be seen. The tone here is buoyant: How gay signals a wish that love could simply be arranged, placed, and approved.

The hinge: Druid and dew divide the lovers

The poem turns hard on Since. Suddenly, the lovers are not parallel plants but rival origins: I am of the Druid, / And she is of the dew. The phrase of the Druid feels older, ritual-bound, human—an inherited system of meaning; of the dew feels elemental, fleeting, unowned. The tension is sharp: the speaker claims a lineage of ceremony while the other figure belongs to pure transience. It’s as if the speaker is too steeped in rites and rules to be the spontaneous, kiss-granting mistletoe.

Buttonhole and sending: tradition replaces possession

Instead of crowning a table, the speaker chooses a smaller, constrained role: I’ll deck Tradition’s buttonhole. A buttonhole flower is worn, pinned, and displayed—love reduced to an accessory. That line makes the sacrifice specific: the speaker becomes the adornment of custom, not the beloved on the table. And then comes the final displacement: send the Rose to you. The rose—what might have been the speaker’s own velvet life—is mailed away, turned into a gift rather than a shared existence.

A sharper question the poem leaves behind

If mistletoe is the plant that permits contact, why does the speaker assign it to she and not to herself? The ending suggests an unsettling possibility: Tradition doesn’t merely block the speaker’s desire—it recruits her to help enforce the distance, neatly pinned in place while the rose goes elsewhere.