This poem appeared in the Springfield Daily Republican on August 2, 1858, under the title 'To Mrs -, with a Rose.'
On August 2, 1858, Dickinson's poem 'Nobody knows this little rose' was published anonymously in the Springfield Daily Republican under the editorial title 'To Mrs -, with a Rose.'
Like her other lifetime publications, this poem appeared without her name attached and likely without her direct involvement in the submission process, illustrating the informal, almost accidental nature of her public authorship during her lifetime.
The poem's delicate, understated imagery of a rose given without recognition can be read, in retrospect, as strikingly resonant with Dickinson's own relationship to fame and publication: modest, private, and indifferent to public acclaim.
This publication came during a period when Dickinson was beginning to compile her poems into hand-sewn booklets known as fascicles, suggesting that by the late 1850s she was already producing a substantial body of work even as she remained almost entirely unknown to the reading public. Only after her death would the scope of her poetic output become apparent, with nearly 1,800 poems discovered among her papers.