I taste a liquor never brewed Analysis

As a regular church-goer, Emily Dickinson knew her way around a hymn or two. So she would have been really familiar with their rhythms. It should come to no surprise, then, that her poems often fol...

It is always very tempting to think that the speaker of a poem is the same as the poet herself, especially when the poet chooses to use first person. Dickinson makes this assumption even more tempt...

The setting for this poem is the big wide world of nature. If we're outside, or at least sitting by an open window (which is probably more likely in Dickinson's case considering what we know about...

Dickinson knows what's she's doing when it comes to illustrating her poems with sound. The speaker talks about being inebriated and most of the sounds in the poem are mumbly, even slurred sounds, m...

So, um, where is the title anyway? Well, there isn't one, really. Dickinson rarely gave her poems titles, and the ones that appear to have titles may not actually be titles at all but just a way to...

Dickinson has a lot of quirky writing habits, but one that stands out in this case is the first person speaker. Sometimes Dickinson will use "I" to indicate the speaker and "you" to indicate the re...

Though there are a couple of vocabulary words that are unfamiliar, the metaphor is fairly easy to identify. In fact, it's all but spelled out in the second stanza if we happened to miss the memo in...

Not all of the Dickinson family stayed cooped up in their bedroom writing poetry. Edward Dickinson, Emily's dad, was a member of the House of Representatives from 1853 to 1855. (Source.) Much like...

Clearly, Dickinson is a responsible drinker—no embarrassing tweets or Facebook posts to deal with the next day. Good for her!