The poem's speaker begins by trying to define "Nature." Nature, of course, is a word that people use all the time; it exists all around us. Yet, as the poem will make clear, nature as a concept is actually pretty hard to pin down with language. This might be why the speaker wraps the word in quotation marks here, as though they're already aware that they're not going to be able to truly define nature in the poem; they're only circling around the idea of "Nature."
First, the speaker posits that the natural world "is what we see." That is, the natural world is right there, outside of the window; people can look at nature and, in doing so, bear witness to its existence.
The speaker then provides a list of some of the aspects of nature that people might "see": the landscape, the shifting light throughout the day, animals, and so on. Notice how there are no connecting conjunction words like "and" in lines 2 and 3. This list is thus an example of asyndeton, and it implies that there are many more things the speaker could mention; the list is not definitive.
The trademark Dickinson em-dash connects the items in this list, resulting in many halting caesurae. It's as though the speaker's gaze is being whipped this way and that as they try to take in all the various examples of nature that surround them.
It's quite a varied list as well:
- The speaker first mentions "The Hill." Note how this is capitalized and given the definite article ("the"). This makes the hill seem all the more tangible, almost as if the speaker points out of the window and says, well, there's some nature right there.
- "With the second item on the list, the poem's already getting complicated. Is "the Afternoon" really something that people "see," or is this just a useful concept that people turn to to make sense of the rhythms of the day? This ambiguity subtly anticipates the speaker's rejection of their own definition of nature.
- Line 3's items are then more tangible. A squirrel, an eclipse, a bumble-bee—these are easy to spot! Notice how the alliteration/consonance of "bumble bee" makes it all the more present on the page, also suggesting that nature can be easily experienced through the senses.
Together, the items on this list imply that nature is the non-human world, including insects, animals, places, and even times of day. The list also speaks to the human desire to categorize—and by categorizing, to understand—the world, as though by naming things they become a little less mysterious.