Speaker
The speaker is likely a stand-in for Dickinson herself. The poem is told entirely from her perspective and everything that occurs is colored by her observational lens. The embedded interiority of her perspective is important to the poem's central idea, as it is focused on depicting a feeling of drunkenness alongside all of its nature imagery. The vividness of her point of view is a reflection of the state in which she finds herself. In feeling intoxicated by the beauty of the natural world around her, the speaker zooms in on various details: the sky, bees, butterflies. She is highlighting the elevation of her mood by showing how these individual things have caught her attention and overwhelmed her. The telescoping of her perspective shows both how these scenes have impacted her and the power she imbues them with.
The speaker is characterized by her sense of freewheeling wonder, as shown in her punctuation choices (dashes, exclamation points) and overall elated tone. These choices show the speaker as almost breathlessly recounting the natural wonders she has seen. She uses the words "inebriate" and "debauchee" to specifically connote her sense of uninhibited looseness. At the same time, this is slightly tongue-in-cheek, given the fact that the "liquor" she has consumed is not any sort of literal alcohol but instead a feeling evoked in nature. Her portrayal of herself as a "little tippler" shows her to be, in this text, inebriated with the power of the world of plants and animals. The word "tippler" refers to a regular consumer of alcohol. Her identification with the phrase shows that she is enthralled by this feeling of headiness and is only able to compare it with alcoholic intoxication. This feeling does shift at the end when she introduces religious imagery (saints, seraphs) into the final stanza. The mood becomes more reflective, showing the speaker in a changed place. Her initial feelings of drunkenness give way to a kind of spiritual awe. That said, these two feelings are strongly linked. The speaker's movement towards religion at the end is not a change from happy to somber. It is, instead, an elevation of that earlier joy to its final form: religious transcendence.
