South winds jostle them—

South winds jostle them—

Bumblebees come—

Hover—hesitate—

Drink, and are gone—

Butterflies pause

On their passage Cashmere—

I—softly plucking,

Present them here!

                                         - F 98 (1859)  86

This is a lovely poem to accompany flowers, which it seems this was written to do. We begin reading it as a puzzle, but we soon deduce that the subject of the poem is flowers. The first stanza paints a little scene—with surprising economy: The flowers are fluttering in a breeze; bumblebees flit about hovering and hesitating over the various blossoms until they find the nectar they are looking for. Once satiated and pollen-laden, they fly off.

            The second stanza brings butterflies that have migrated all the way from “Cashmere” – and this exotic and distant location has the added advantage of its name implying a softness that the butterflies might experience in the soft fabric of summer air, or the soft breath of their wings stir up. This idea is reinforced by Dickinson’s use of the word “softly” in the following line. The poet softly plucks the flower to present. She’s not going to rip them out of the earth.

            Still, it is a bit wrenching, the pulling up of the nodding flowers amid their bees and butterflies. I think that Dickinson is writing on a deeper level about poetry. There in the garden with its breezes, bees, and butterflies (Dickinson’s oft-used “B” trilogy), are poems waiting to be plucked. And we’ve seen that in quite a few of the poems before this #98 – poems pulled out of the garden as if organically peopled by the jays and bobolinks and bees. The poet plucks them, writes them down, and presents them to us, the reader.