Emily Dickinson

Perhaps you’d like to buy a flower

Summary


In "Perhaps you'd like to buy a flower," Emily Dickinson turns a simple shop counter into a spring riddle. A speaker offers blooms that can never be sold, only lent, and only until the daffodil unties her yellow bonnet and the bees come for their clover "hock and sherry." The tone is teasing and tender, full of playful imagery and a sly sense of fleeting time. In just a few lines, the poem makes borrowed beauty feel precious.

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PERHAPS you’d like to buy a flower?
But I could never sell.
If you would like to borrow
Until the daffodil

Unties her yellow bonnet
Beneath the village door,
Until the bees, from clover rows
Their hock and sherry draw,

Why, I will lend until just then,
But not an hour more!

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Credits

Emily Dickinson was a reclusive 19th-century American poet whose compact, inventive verses were mostly published after her death. This poem shows her habit of speaking through small garden scenes, with bees drinking like tipsy guests at a country inn.