If I should die

Dickinson knew her Emerson, read her Whitman. She was versed in the Old Testament writings in which nature was upcycled into Creation, a grand manifestation of a spiritual energy named God the Creator, who found His sublime pleasure in being realized in physical form. Nature, however, for Emerson, schooled in Christian theology, and for his acolyte Whitman, both embracing the celebratory gospel of Transcendentalism, regarded nature as a manifestation of some organizing principle, not God (who for them was an entity bound and restricted by dogma and doctrine) but rather of some grand and unknowable Good. To engage nature, then, was to feel energy that transcended the ephemeral objects in nature, from trees to horses, from the sun to an individual person, and to understand the cosmos as a vast, whirling single-cell organism alive with an energy that could not, would not ever embrace exhaustion.

That sense of energy, both spiritual and physical, both transcendent and organic, compels the first half of the poem. The elements of nature that the speaker features—the morning sun, the radiant there-ness of noon, the birds and the bees—in sum represent nature’s irrepressible rhythms and its commitment to its own endurance. Within that grand order, the speaker reasons, no single element, doomed to death, can be anything but immaterial. No more than the death of, say, an individual bee or the loss of a single bird, the quick drama of a sunrise or the sweeping drama of noon so easily passed, can diminish that sense of animation, can the life and death of a single individual matter. There are swarms of bees, flocks of birds, a sunrise tomorrow, and another noon. It is, perhaps, a difficult reality to embrace—necessitating as it does a hard degree of humility—but the reassurance is what the opening half of the poem offers. Be amazed by the power of nature, the speaker argues, because you are part of that energy field.