OPPapers.com Essay Index >> Miscellaneous >> &Quot;I Taste A Liquor Never Brewed&Quot;
We have many free term papers and essays on &Quot;I Taste A Liquor Never Brewed&Quot;. We also have a wide variety of research papers and book reports available to you for free. You can browse our collection of term papers or use our search engine.
Submitted by pprzman on April 1, 2007
Category: Miscellaneous
Words: 1056 | Pages: 5
Views: 1599
Popularity Rank: 2,292
Average Member Grade: N/A (Add a Comment / Grade this Paper)
Analysis of Emily Dickinson's "I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed"
Emily Dickinson. What comes to mind from her name? Having written nearly 1,800 poems, she was a very prolific poet and, as some consider, "a poet of dread" (Melani). Was she all that dreadful? Death is a major topic in many of her poems but I think she had a very keen sense of life as well. In Dickinson's poem, "I taste a liquor never brewed," she uses metaphor, symbolism and imagery to articulate her appreciation of nature.
The theme of Emily Dickinson's "I taste a liquor never brewed" can be interpreted in several ways. Some have suggested that the "I" in the poem stands for a "hummingbird which [Dickinson] imagines to be telling about its drunken spree" (Eby 517). My interpretation of the poem is that the "I" is Dickinson herself. This gives the poem a more personal, symbolic meaning. She compares her enjoyment and pleasure from nature to that of being intoxicated.
She gets a natural high as opposed to an artificial one from a drug. Today's society is shifting away from this feeling of nature. This poem brings us back to a time when technology was not needed to be entertained.
Dickinson uses metaphors, or comparisons, to establish the theme. The first line that is also used as the title, "I taste a liquor never brewed," has a metaphor that one can only understand if the theme is known. Her liquor that is never brewed is nature. She is tasting nature in a sense. Dickinson continues the theme of drunkenness in the second stanza: "Inebriate of air am I / And debauchee of dew" (5-6). She is comparing her feeling for nature to being drunk by saying that the air and dew literally cause intoxication. Another example of metaphor is "Reeling, through endless summer days" (Dickinson 7). She is reeling, or staggering, like an intoxicated person from the "endless summer days" instead of an alcohol. The third stanza has a metaphor: "When landlords turn the drunken bee / Out of...
You must Login to view the entire paper.
If you are not a member yet, Sign Up for free!