Stanza 1 Summary

Line 1

I taste a liquor never brewed – 

• Dickinson jumps right in with both feet by starting this poem with both a paradox and a metaphor. 
• If the liquor was "never brewed," um, how did she taste it? That's the paradox. 
• So, what kind of impossible drink might this be? Well, maybe she's not really talking about liquor. If that's true, then this is starting to look like a metaphor, but we'll have to keep reading to know for sure.
• If she is using liquor as a metaphor, though, then what is she really talking about? Whatever it is, it isn't something so simple as the product of a brewing process. The next few lines will hopefully give us a better clue what this liquor might be…. 
• But before we check, we should note here that we say "she" to mean the poem's speaker, not necessarily Dickinson herself.
• It's important not to mistake the poet for the speaker. Even though in this case the two seem to be pretty closely related, we can't know for sure.

Line 2

From Tankards scooped in Pearl – 

• Old-timey vocab alert, gang: "tankards" are large drinking cups made of horn, wood, metal, or pottery, depending on the time and place—extremely popular with Hobbits and at Renaissance Faires. Usually they're filled with beer.
• Speaking of beer, a good brew usually has a white, frothy head that looks a lot like pearl. So this could just be a figurative description of what those mugs look like.
• Of course, since she's not really drinking anything, she doesn't really need a tankard to drink from. That means that this must be another metaphor.
• Whatever the speaker's enjoying here, it's as if she's enjoying it like a full glass of beer. (Mmm… beer.) It's a nice glass at that, since the pearl gives us a sense of its fanciness. Still, she's not really drinking, since this liquor is "never brewed." 
• So what's so enjoyable, then? We'll have to read on. 
• Before we do, though, we know you have one more burning question: What's with all the capital letters? Nope, those aren't typos. We can't ever really know for sure what was going on in any poet's head, but it turns out that Dickinson's odd capitalization habits might actually have been conventional style for someone of her education. It certainly wouldn't be a popular textbook now, but for a short time in the 1800s Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, where Dickinson went, decided to adopt William Harvey Wells' A Grammar of the English Language: For the Use of Schools and this book encourages what looks to us like reckless abandon in capitalization. Apparently there is some sort of method to this madness though, and Dickinson embraced it. The capitalization may also give us a clue as to the importance that these words play in the overall message of the poem, give a few choice ones some extra oomph. 

Lines 3-4

Not all the Frankfort Berries
Yield such an Alcohol! 

• Frankfort am Main, Germany sits on the Main River, which is a primary tributary of the Rhine River. Wait, this isn't a geography lesson, so why are we telling you this?
• Because the grapes grown in the valley along the Rhine River are famous for the white wines they turn into, which is what the speaker is talking about here. In fact, in another version of this poem, line 3 is changed to "Not all the Vats upon the Rhine," giving us a pretty good idea that she's talking about the wine from this area. 
• Whatever the speaker is enjoying (it's still not clear at this point), it must be something quite special, since all the finest wine in the Rhine valley can't even come close to the quality of liquor that it produces.
• This is a pretty big statement. It's so big that it probably qualifies as a bit of hyperbole.
• One last thing before we leave this first stanza: notice any rhyme here? Yeah, us neither—unless…
• Well, if you listen very closely, you can hear that "Pearl" and "Alcohol" sort of rhyme. They have the same ending sound (L), anyway. That's what's called in the poetry biz slant rhyme. It's not quite a full rhyme, but there is an echo. Why did Dickinson go this route? Check out "Form and Meter" for more on that.