To Make a Prairie

To Make a Prairie - context Summary

Composed in 1862

Written in 1862 and later printed in the 1893 collection Poems: Second Series, this short lyric frames a modest natural scene as an act of creative imagination. Dickinson lists minimal ingredients — a clover, a bee — then insists that thought or "revery" can suffice to conjure a prairie when physical elements are scarce. The poem reflects her habit of finding expansive meaning in small, domestic observations and suggests imagination as a formative, sufficient force for making landscape and experience.