Nature (Motif)
The poem's middle four lines concern themselves with nature. The speaker goes into detail describing nature's "Message," "Majesty," and "News," personifying it with the pronoun "Her." Nature comes to function in the poem as a kind of motif about what sort of understanding the speaker has sought out in her writing. In using various ideas related to nature, she places a value on it and what it has been able to provide her with: the most meaningful understanding of the world around her she could receive. This idea is further solidified in the poem's closing, in which the speaker expresses a hope that her countrymen's love of nature could allow them to judge her more kindly. That said, she also depicts her relationship with nature as one that provides no simple answers. Her use of the word "News" carries with it a slightly double-sided connotation. In its most literal sense, news usually refers to the daily events captured in headlines. However, here, as is suggested by its connection to the word "Message," Dickinson uses it to convey a more spiritual idea. In the context of the poem, nature does offer new daily experiences, but it also has the capacity to impart deeper, more mysterious truths about the larger world. The usage of "News" in this case becomes almost playful. Dickinson is pointing out that nature contains these richer lessons, but actually seems to be contrasting it with the easy immediacy of daily newsprint. Where regular news can be understood with no analysis on the part of the reader, nature demands a significantly more thoughtful engagement. The speaker frames her complex bond with nature as one that requires her to decipher the "messages" it gives her. Its "news" cannot be grasped directly. Nature does not make itself easy to understand or access, but for Dickinson the effort is worth a lifetime of work.
Letter (Symbol)
The poem's central symbol is the titular "letter" that, in the first line, the speaker says she is writing: "this is my letter to the World." The speaker's use of the deictic ("this") clues the reader into the fact that the "letter" is in fact the poem we are reading. This tells us that it is not literally a letter; the speaker calls it such in order to evoke certain symbolic associations.
First among these is communication. The letter works to frame the entire poem as an address. The speaker is appealing to members of her community in the hope that they will better understand her. She also notes, importantly, that no such letter has been written to her, meaning that this world has not made an effort to acknowledge her. She is beginning a correspondence that she had hoped for a long time ago. The importance of the letter as a symbol is that it shows the writer directing her ideas at a particular audience with a particular goal in mind. The poem's observations are not random musings; they are the speaker's attempt to explain herself to people who have found her to be strange or off-putting.
The symbolism of the letter also reflects the speaker's relationship to nature. In the middle section of the poem, the speaker details the various subtle ways in which nature has transmitted information to her. She describes her continual struggle to understand and define the "News" that nature has imparted to her obliquely. For her, writing about nature has been a constant process of wrestling with mysterious pieces of information, a relationship defined by nebulousness. In this regard, the symbol of the letter takes on a double meaning. If the speaker's relationship with the outside "World" is characterized by a lack of understanding, then this letter is an attempt to reveal the speaker's complexity. Paralleling the opacity of nature's "News," the speaker is suggesting that she is not easily known. She is implying, by offering this symbolic letter, that the outside world may have to contend with the same ambiguities and nuances in her that she has sought to untangle in nature. She is simultaneously accounting for her pursuits, and revealing that she contains layers of depth.
Countrymen (Symbol)
The countrymen portrayed in the poem serve as a symbol of the social judgment that the speaker has experienced. As expressed in the poem's opening, the speaker has been mostly cut off from the social world around her. She has instead sought to learn from the "message" of nature. As a result, it is not difficult to imagine why the speaker's compatriots would find her odd or hard to comprehend. The generality of the term "countrymen" functions as a symbolic stand-in for the acceptance of her peers. This seems particularly true given the speaker's use of the word "judge" in the closing. She is acutely aware of the gaze of these people; she simply wishes that they look at her with some degree of tenderness now that she has provided some accounting of why she pursues the things she does.
