Like all of Dickinson's poetry the "Letter to the World" is "deceptively simple." She has the ability to compress into a few lines thoughts that another poet might take pages to express. Or, conversely, these two stanzas embody a single thought that in itself isn't necessarily a totally original one, but is expressed with such lucidity that new life is given to it beyond its obvious surface meaning. This, after all, is the essence of the poetic: to provide an arresting and memorable version of an idea the reader will recognize as valid, and which relates to the human condition governing all of us irrespective of our differences and of the uniqueness of every individual person.
I would argue that Dickinson's personal isolation throughout her life is one key to understanding these lines. The "letter to the world" is not just this one poem, but all of her work, which remained largely unknown until after her death. Yet Dickinson's own life—her feelings, her desires, and her mental world—largely remained unknown to the outside world. She was more or less a recluse, a shut-in. She probably viewed herself as a person unsuited to the usual roles that women (or people in general) were expected to accept and to play. By the "news that Nature told" she could be alluding to her own idiosyncratic "nature," to her individuality, and to her loneliness. From the start we are told of a lack of reciprocity, perhaps the fact that she and her poetry are both a hidden gift that no one has noticed or appreciated. In the hands of a lesser poet, it would be easy for this message to lapse into sentimentality or self-pity. But the meaning of Dickinson's "nature" is ambiguous. Even if her themes are sometimes couched in riddles, this enhances the expressive power of her verse rather than detracting from it. Why, we might ask, did Nature impart this "simple news" with a "tender majesty"? And whose are the unseen "hands" to which the message was committed?
These questions have no direct answers. It is a striking idea presented to us here that there is an unknown receiver of this "message," a third party—apart from the speaker and her audience—to whom a deeper meaning (the target domain, if we wish) has been entrusted. Or, the point may be that the speaker herself doesn't know what that message is. Those who lead lives that are incomplete, unfinished—as Dickinson probably viewed her own life—often have a sense that God has purposely withheld from them the reasons for this. Perhaps, the thinking often goes, for such people a different kind of purpose has been prepared for them. Dickinson gives us the shape of this idea, but not the substance of it, since it's for the reader to give his or her own special interpretation, of both the meaning the poem conveys, and the personal version of it that the reader might be experiencing.
The final thought, the speaker's wish that she might be "judged tenderly," reveals an additional thematic element which, again, we might examine in light of Dickinson's own personal story. Anyone leading a different lifestyle from what is considered the norm, as Dickinson did, is likely to feel implicitly judged by others. It's a phenomenon that applies not just to those who violate religious or moral strictures but to people who simply don't fit in, ones whose lives don't follow the expected trajectory even if they haven't violated any rules and haven't done anything explicitly wrong. Whatever it was that caused her isolation and her unfulfilled emotional life, Dickinson kept the secret buried in her heart, and this fact makes "This is my Letter to the World" all the more poignant.
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