Dickinson treats cosmic loss like a misplaced object. The poem opens with the mundane phrasing of a newspaper classified ad: 'Has anybody found?' This deflation is deliberate—she's taking something enormous (a world) and processing it through the language of everyday carelessness.
The 'row of stars / Around its forehead bound' identifies what's lost through crown imagery. In Dickinson's lexicon, 'world' rarely means the planet—it's her code for a complete system of meaning. She lost entire worlds regularly: her faith during the religious revivals she refused to join, her hope of literary recognition, possibly specific people who died or left Amherst.
The frugal eye versus the rich man sets up her core economic metaphor. Dickinson consistently positioned herself as poor in worldly terms but rich in perception. A wealthy person 'might not notice' this loss because they measure value in ducats (she chooses an archaic, foreign coin to emphasize the rich man's distance from her). She measures in something else—attention, spiritual worth, the ability to see what matters. The final plea 'Oh, find it, sir, for me!' returns to the lost-and-found notice, but now we hear desperation under the politeness.