The Irreducible Ingredient
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, One clover, and a bee, And revery. The revery alone will do, If bees are few.
, Poems (1896)
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, One clover, and a bee, And revery. The revery alone will do, If bees are few.
, Poems (1896)
A recipe for a prairie: clover, bee, revery. In Dickinson’s miniature cosmos, these are the necessary ingredients—though she quickly revises even this spare list. The clover and bee, she admits, are negotiable. What remains non-negotiable is the revery.
We live in a time of astonishing productive capacity. Landscapes can be rendered in seconds, detailed beyond what human hands could sketch in weeks. Yet this tiny poem keeps asking its uncomfortable question: not whether we can generate the image of a prairie, but whether an image generated without revery is, in some essential sense, a prairie at all.
Revery is not quite imagination. It implies time wandering, consciousness drifting, the mind following its own unpredictable weather. It might be the least efficient mental state imaginable—and here, Dickinson marks it as the irreducible requirement for genuine making. Everything else has workarounds: “If bees are few.”
There is something both reassuring and unsettling about this. Reassuring, because it locates creative power in something no tool can replicate or shortcut. Unsettling, because revery is precisely what efficiency culture makes difficult. The materials for making are more available than ever. The wandering attention that transforms them—that remains as scarce as it always was.