Ballad Meter
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 followed the same pattern as her church songs. That form is known as the ballad.
Now, we don't mean those slow rock jams. The ballad comes to us from way back in the day, before paper (never mind iPads), when poets used to deliver their poems as song. Now, the ballad is a perfect form if you want to belt out your poem in song because of its regular rhythm and steady rhyme. As well, it sports quatrains with alternating lines of "iambic tetrameter." What's that mean in English? Well, each odd-numbered line has eight syllables, divided up into four iambs per line). An iamb is a two-syllable pair which starts with an unstressed syllable and ends on a stressed one: daDUM. Four of those bad boys in one line? You've got some sweet iambic tetrameter ("tetra-" means four) on your hands:
I taste a liquor never brewed—
Hear the iambs? You should get daDUM daDUM daDUM daDUM in your ear. Now let's take a look at the second line:
From Tankards scooped in Pearl—
You should hear just one less daDUM there. That's because the even lines have iambic trimeter ("tri-" meaning three)—daDUM daDUM daDUM—containing three iambs. The poem then alternates between tetrameter and trimeter throughout the poem.
Of course, now that we've explained all that, you might notice that the very next line doesn't follow this pattern:
Not all the Frankfort Berries
This lands somewhere in between, with three and a half iambs it's supposed to have four. At first glance, it may look like ol' Emily just couldn't come up with the right words to give it one more syllable, but if we look at the last stanza, we see that she does the same thing again in line 15:
To seethe little Tippler
Here again, we only have three and a half iambs. Breaking the meter and then making a pattern out of that broken meter is how Dickinson mixes it up to avoid sounding too predictable and sing-songy. In fact, what it sounds like is someone stumbling around and rambling in a drunken haze.
In fact, the same can be said for this poem's rhyme scheme. We get perfect end rhymes on the even-numbered lines in stanzas 2, 3, and 4: ABCB, where the letter represents that line's end rhyme. But the first stanza is just… well, odd. "Pearl" and "Alcohol" don't rhyme exactly. They only kind of rhyme. That near rhyme, also known as slant rhyme, is another way to avoid making the poem too predictable in the way it's put together. More than that, like the meter stumbles in lines with only three and a half iambs, this slant rhyme represents another kind of playful sloppiness. It's actually pretty fitting, given the state that our "drunken," blissed-out speaker is in.