An analysis of Sujata Bhatt’s poem “Counting Sheep White Blood Cells” could center on the merger of nature and science.

The first stanzas compare the cells to classifying stars and counting “all the tiny wild flowers / in a never-ending field.” Here, the lab technician ties science to the type of wonder that’s often synonymous with nature. There’s transcendence and forcefulness. Counting the blood cells makes the technician feel “powerful” and “wired.” It’s like she is what gives “electricity for that microscope.”

In his essay “Nature,” Ralph Waldo Emerson describes feeling “a perfect exhilaration” in nature. Bhatt’s poem features a similar intoxication. It’s like the technician is drunk off the wonders of her work. Putting in a new slide, “the lab whirled / unreal around her.” The cells contain the attractive qualities of nature too. Using imagery, Bhatt portrays the cells as “beautiful / strangely rounded flowers.”

Another way to analyze the poem is to unpack the diction and the notion of counting sheep. Typically, people count sheep to fall asleep. In the poem, the lab technician tallies the blood cells of sheep to get lost in a heady universe. Bhatt seems to be playing with the counting sheep trope by removing it from its quotidian context and placing it in the realm of scientific discovery.