Emily Dickinson

Fringed Gentian

GOD made a little gentian;

failed rose

Gentians bloom blue-purple, never rose-pink. The flower can't 'try' to be something else—Dickinson is making the plant conscious of its difference.

It tried to be a rose
And failed, and all the summer laughed.
But just before the snows
There came a purple creature

purple creature

Shift from 'little gentian' to 'purple creature'—once it blooms in its own season, it becomes something powerful and strange, almost animal.

That ravished all the hill;
And summer hid her forehead,
And mockery was still.
The frosts were her condition;

Tyrian

Tyrian purple was the most expensive dye in the ancient world, made from thousands of crushed sea snails. Imperial purple, worth more than gold.

The Tyrian would not come
Until the North evoked it.
"Creator! shall I bloom?"

Creator! shall I bloom?

The only quotation in the poem. The gentian speaks directly to God, asking permission—but it's already blooming as it asks.

Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

Late Blooming as Vindication

Fringed gentians bloom in September and October, after most flowers have finished. Dickinson knew them from the Amherst meadows—they appear just before frost kills everything. The poem turns this late timing into a story about waiting for the right conditions.

The gentian 'fails' at being a rose in summer, when roses are supposed to bloom. 'All the summer laughed'—the whole season mocks it. But then comes the reversal: the gentian appears as a 'purple creature' that 'ravished all the hill,' and 'summer hid her forehead' in shame. What looked like failure was just wrong timing.

Dickinson wrote this around 1878, after two decades of publishing almost nothing. She'd sent poems to Thomas Wentworth Higginson in 1862; he'd told her they weren't quite ready, weren't quite conventional enough. 'The frosts were her condition'—the gentian needs cold to bloom. Some things only work under harsh conditions, in the wrong season, when everyone else has quit.

The Economics of Purple

'The Tyrian would not come / Until the North evoked it'—Dickinson calls the flower 'the Tyrian,' referencing Tyrian purple, the imperial dye of Rome. Extracting one gram required crushing 10,000 murex snails. Only emperors could afford clothes that color.

The gentian's purple appears for free, in a field, in Massachusetts, in fall. But Dickinson uses the costliest word she can find for it. The late-blooming flower that 'failed' to be a rose turns out to be more valuable than anything summer produced—it just took the right observer to see it. The North 'evokes' it, a word meaning to summon or call forth, as if the cold were a conjurer.

That final question—'Creator! shall I bloom?'—is asked while blooming. The gentian doesn't wait for permission. It asks God while already doing the thing it's asking about. Dickinson published seven poems in her lifetime and left 1,800 in a drawer. She knew about blooming without permission.