Till Seraphs swing their snowy Hats—
And Saints—to windows run—
To see the little Tippler
Leaning against the—Sun—

These lines come from one of Emily Dickinson’s short lyric poems in which she imagines a tiny creature—often read as a bee—drinking nectar and becoming a “little Tippler.” Written in Dickinson’s characteristic hymn-meter quatrains with emphatic dashes and playful capitalization, the poem belongs to her recurring nature-and-transcendence mode: minute observations of the garden are lifted into cosmic spectacle. Dickinson composed most of her poetry privately in Amherst, Massachusetts, during the 1850s–1860s, circulating it mainly in letters and fascicles rather than in print. The whimsical celestial audience (“Seraphs,” “Saints”) reflects her habit of blending Christian imagery with irreverent humor and wonder at the natural world.

The stanza turns an everyday scene into a mock-apocalyptic pageant. The “little Tippler” suggests intoxication—by nectar, by sunlight, by summer itself—so intense that even heaven pauses to watch. Dickinson’s joke is double-edged: the smallest life can appear grand when viewed with imaginative attention, and spiritual awe may be triggered by earthly, bodily pleasure rather than solemn piety. “Leaning against the—Sun—” exaggerates the creature’s drunken swagger into a cosmic posture, collapsing scale between insect and star. The effect is both celebratory and slyly subversive, implying that ecstasy and holiness can look like tipsiness, and that nature’s ordinary cycles are worthy of angelic astonishment.