The Full Text of “Fame is a fickle food”
1Fame is a fickle food
2Upon a shifting plate
3Whose table once a
4Guest but not
5The second time is set
6Whose crumbs the crows inspect
7And with ironic caw
8Flap past it to the
9Farmer’s corn
10Men eat of it and die
The Full Text of “Fame is a fickle food”
1Fame is a fickle food
2Upon a shifting plate
3Whose table once a
4Guest but not
5The second time is set
6Whose crumbs the crows inspect
7And with ironic caw
8Flap past it to the
9Farmer’s corn
10Men eat of it and die
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“Fame is a fickle food” Introduction
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Emily Dickinson's "Fame is a fickle food" presents celebrity as something volatile and unpredictable. Getting a taste of this metaphorical food one day is no guarantee that you'll get it the next. Even unscrupulous scavengers like "crows" steer clear of fame's dubious "crumbs," the speaker says, preferring the humble yet reliable nutrition of "Farmer's corn." Like most of Dickinson's poems, "Fame is a fickle food" was discovered after her death and published in the posthumous 1924 collection, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson.
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“Fame is a fickle food” Summary
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Celebrity, the speaker says, is an unreliable source of sustenance served on an equally unreliable dish. One may find oneself a welcome visitor at its table one moment only to find one's seat has been taken the next. Even scavenger birds look closely at fame's leftover morsels and scoff, then fly away in search of simple, hearty food instead. People taste fame, the speaker says, and then they die.
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“Fame is a fickle food” Themes
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The Fleeting, Unreliable Nature of Fame
“Fame is a fickle food” presents fame as an unhealthy and unreliable source of sustenance. To be “fickle” is to be volatile and inconstant. In comparing fame to “fickle food,” then, the speaker argues that celebrity may taste good but is prone to suddenly disappearing. As such, even crows turn up their noses at its crumbs, preferring the reliable nourishment of “Farmer’s corn.” The humble products of hard work and dedication, the poem implies, are far more valuable than the fleeting excitement of fame.
The poem treats “fame” and celebrity as unpredictable and ultimately out of people’s control. “Fame is a fickle food” in the sense that it can change in an instant. People may get a taste for fame only to return to the “table” to find that no place has been “set” for them because fame has latched onto a new target. In fact, the very “plate” that fame is served on is also “shifting,” or unstable. This suggests that something that’s popular one moment might no longer be in favor the next. As such, one can only ever be a “Guest” when it comes to eating at celebrity’s table—there are no guarantees of having a seat.
Given that food is essential to life, the speaker’s metaphor implies that fame isn’t worth much in the first place. It’s essentially junk food: tasty and exciting but devoid of actual, lasting nourishment. Even crows, scavengers of the animal world who will eat just about anything, are too smart to mess with the remains of this “fickle” food. They may fly in to “inspect” the “crumbs” of fame, yet, with an “ironic caw” (or a mocking cry), they’ll go seek “Farmer’s corn” instead. This implies that humble yet consistent nourishment is better than the fleeting treat of fame.
The speaker goes on to say that “Men eat of [fame] and die,” implying that celebrity is outright toxic. (This would certainly explain why the crows steer clear of it!) That’s not to say fame literally kills the person who tastes it, but rather that it makes them crave something they can never have again. Fame, once tasted, only results in a feeling of absence, a deep longing to have it again. In this way, the poem suggests that it is perhaps better never to taste fame at all. While its excitement may be tempting, in the long run, fame will only cause misery.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Fame is a fickle food”
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Lines 1-2
Fame is a fickle food
Upon a shifting plateThe speaker wastes no time in stating exactly how they feel about "fame." Using a metaphor, they compare fame to a "fickle" (unpredictable or volatile) "food." Given that food is essential to life, this metaphor implies that people mustn't rely on fame for any sort of soulful nourishment.
Notice how the thick /f/ alliteration of this opening line makes the speaker's declaration all the more emphatic and memorable:
Fame is a fickle food
The first line reads like an aphorism: short, clever, and quotable, it has the feeling of bearing some profound truth in just a few words.
The speaker builds on the idea of "fame" as "food" in the next line, saying that this metaphorical meal is served "Upon a shifting plate." Not only is fame itself unpredictable, then, but the context in which fame exists is also inconstant. That is, what's in one day might be out the next; fame is "shifting" in the sense that people can never get a firm grip on it.
These first two lines are written mostly in iambic trimeter, a meter consisting of three iambs in a row, with a variation in the first foot of line 1:
Fame is | a fick- | le food
Upon | a shift- | ing plateThat opening foot ("Fame is") is a trochee (a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable), which is a common variation in iambic meters and starts the poem off on a rousing, forceful note. After this, the poem follows a steady da-DUM rhythm that grants its lines a familiar, musical cadence.
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Lines 3-5
Whose table once a
Guest but not
The second time is set -
Lines 6-7
Whose crumbs the crows inspect
And with ironic caw -
Lines 8-9
Flap past it to the
Farmer’s corn -
Line 10
Men eat of it and die
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“Fame is a fickle food” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Alliteration
Alliteration adds musicality and rhythm to the poem, and it also calls readers' attention to key moments. The first line, for instance, is particularly memorable thanks to all the /f/ alliteration:
Fame is a fickle food
Alliteration emphasizes the importance of this opening line, which encapsulates the speaker's argument and has the clever concision of an aphorism.
Elsewhere, alliteration affects the speaker's tone. Take lines 6-7, where sharp /cr/ and /c/ alliteration makes the speaker's descriptions of nature's disdain for "fame" all the more emphatic:
Whose crumbs the crows inspect
And with ironic cawThe harsh sounds here evoke the "caw[ing]" sound that crows make (as does the more straightforward onomatopoeia of "caw"). The consonance of "inspect" adds to the effect as well.
There's more alliteration in the next two lines, as the speaker says that the crows "Flap past it [fame] to the / Farmer's corn." Once again, this sonic repetition adds memorable music to the poem and highlights the image of scavenging crows swiftly flapping past the worthless crumbs of celebrity.
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Consonance
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Assonance
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Extended Metaphor
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Enjambment
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Personification
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"Fame is a fickle food" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Fickle
- Shifting plate
- Ironic
- Caw
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Unreliable or unpredictable.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Fame is a fickle food”
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Form
"Fame is a fickle food" is made up of 10 lines. The poem is sometimes broken into two stanzas, with a stanza break between lines 5 and 6 (it's often difficult to know for certain what Dickinson intended due to the handwritten nature of her poems, most of which weren't discovered until after her death).
Dickinson usually wrote using quatrains, or stanzas of four lines, often using common or ballad meter (meaning the lines would alternate between iambic trimeter and iambic tetrameter—three da-DUMs and four da-DUMs—and follow and ABCB rhyme scheme; more on this in the Meter and Rhyme Scheme sections of this guide).
Listening to the poem aloud, it actually sounds like a pretty standard Dickinson poem. The main difference on the page is that she's broken what would typically be each quatrain's third line in half. That is, metrically, lines 3-4 scan like a single line of iambic tetrameter. Note, too, that there's a slant rhyme between "plate" and "set"—what would normally be the second and fourth lines of the quatrain, had Dickinson not split that third line:
Fame is a fickle food
Upon a shifting plate
Whose table once a / Guest but not
The second time is setThe sharp enjambment after "a" (visible in Dickinson's handwritten version of the poem) adds a bit of shiftiness to this poem about the "shifting" nature of fame. The same thing happens in the second half of the poem. What would typically be the third line of the stanza gets split in two, with another sharp enjambment:
Whose crumbs the crows inspect
And with ironic caw
Flap past it to the / Farmer’s corn
Men eat of it and dieAgain, there's a (very, very faint) slant rhyme in what would normally be the second and fourth lines of a quatrain ("caw"/"die"), and again the third line feels like it's been cut off in its middle.
Of course, Dickinson didn't actually write the poem like this! In breaking up the expected quatrains, she made the poem itself more "fickle."
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Meter
"Fame is a fickle food" is a bit of an odd Dickinson poem in terms of meter: read aloud, its rhythms stick close to the iambic trimeter found in many of her poems (meaning lines have three iambs, poetic feet with a da-DUM rhythm), but the text is broken up at unpredictable places on the page.
Take a look at lines 1-2:
Fame is | a fick- | le food
Upon | a shift- | ing plateLine 1 is mostly in iambic trimeter, though it begins with a trochee (a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable). This is a minor variation that emphasizes the word "Fame," which is, of course, what the poem's about! Line 2 is then in perfect iambic trimeter.
These first two lines set up an expectation that the whole poem will be written in iambic trimeter, but lines 3-4 quickly undermine that expectation:
Whose tab- | le once | a
Guest but notHere, the poem is still following an iambic rhythm, but the syllable count for each line is off thanks to the enjambment after "a." Note, however, that if you were to compress these two lines, you'd have a line of perfect iambic tetrameter (a line of four iambs):
Whose tab- | le once / a Guest | but not
After this, the poem moves back to regular iambic trimeter:
The sec- | ond time | is set
Whose crumbs | the crows | inspect
And with | iron- | ic cawLines 8-9 feature the same pattern as lines 3-4: they're essentially one line of iambic tetrameter broken in half:
Flap past | it to / the Farm- | er’s corn
Readers might scan that first foot as a spondee (two stressed beats in a row, "Flap past"), granting extra emphasis to the crows' swift movement away from the crumbs of fame. Still, the overall iambic rhythm remains intact.
In essentially breaking the third line of each stanza in half, Dickinson has made a predictable meter a little shiftier. That is, the poem's slippery meter mirrors the poem's argument that fame is "fickle" and "shifting." Just as one can't ever predict "fame," one can't really get one's footing in this poem.
The final line then returns to iambic trimeter, though it's again possible to hear a spondee in that opening foot:
Men eat | of it | and die
This extra stress in an otherwise metered line adds weight to the speaker's pronouncement about the dangers of fame.
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Rhyme Scheme
Reading the poem aloud, one can hear an echo of Dickinson's typical ABCB rhyme scheme—though this rhyme scheme doesn't actually appear on the page.
As noted in the Form and Meter sections of this guide, Dickinson has essentially chopped lines 3 and 8 in half. There's no pause between the ends of these lines and the starts of the next; read aloud, they simply sound like continuous lines. If one were to combine them on the page with lines 4 and 9, respectively, they'd each become complete lines of iambic tetrameter and the rhyme scheme would look more like it sounds. Take a look at how this would work:
Fame is a fickle food
Upon a shifting plate
Whose table once a / Guest but not
The second time is set
Whose crumbs the crows inspect
And with ironic caw
Flap past it to the / Farmer's corn
Men eat of it and dieOf course, Dickinson didn't actually write the poem this way! The dissonance between what the ear hears (mostly regular meter and rhyme) and what the eye sees contributes to the poem's own "fickle[ness]." That is, things feel as slippery and unpredictable as the "fame" the speaker so distrusts.
Even laid out like this, though, the poem's rhymes are far from perfect. Dickinson is known for her use of slant rhyme, and the first rhyme, between "plate" and "set" in lines 2 and 5, is a great example of this. The /t/ sound at the end of each word gives just enough resonance for the reader to recognize it as a rhyme, but not so much that it sounds sing-songy. The imperfection of the rhyme keeps the reader feeling a little unsteady, evoking the uncertainty of "fame."
What's really interesting is the near lack of rhyme between "caw" and "die" in lines 7 and 10. There's only the very faintest of slant rhymes here, and the speaker has thus messed with readers' expectations once again. The near disappearance of rhyme echoes the inevitable disappearance of "Fame."
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“Fame is a fickle food” Speaker
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The speaker of this poem is anonymous, providing no information about their gender, age, or their own relationship to "fame." This anonymity makes sense, given that the speaker has no interest in being well-known!
It's worth noting that Dickinson herself was decidedly not famous in her lifetime (though she has posthumously gone on to become one of the most recognizable names in poetry). She became extremely reclusive later in life and wrote many poems about the value of anonymity, legacy, and the perils of publication. As such, readers might reasonably take the speaker's perspective to represent that of the poet herself.
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“Fame is a fickle food” Setting
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The poem doesn't have a clear setting, and its argument about the nature of fame could apply to any context. The speaker describes a "shifting plate" upon set "table," but there's no actual dinner party happening: instead, this is part of the speaker's metaphorical comparison of fame to "food." The next few lines conjure images of "crows" turning up their beaks at the "crumbs" of fame left behind on this imagined table, and instead flapping off to find some "Farmer's corn." Again, though, this image is metaphorical, a way for the speaker to convey fame's "fickle," unhealthy nature.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Fame is a fickle food”
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Literary Context
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), one of the world's most influential and beloved poets, might never have been known at all. She published only a handful of poems during her lifetime, preferring to keep much of her writing private. Dickinson only became widely known after her death, when her sister Lavinia discovered a cache of nearly 1,800 secret poems and brought them to publication with the help of a (sometimes combative) group of Dickinson's family and friends.
That said, it would be a mistake to view Dickinson only as a literary recluse or to think that she didn’t intend for her poetry to be read in the future. She ordered many of her poems into sequences that she then sewed together into fascicles (or booklets), saving many others as unbound sheets.
"Fame is a fickle food" is far from the only poem Dickinson wrote on the subject of celebrity (see: "Fame is a bee," "Fame is the one that does not stay," "Fame is the tint that Scholars leave," and "The Clover's simple Fame"). She also argued for the value of anonymity in one of her best-known poems, "I'm Nobody! Who are you?"
Dickinson was inspired both by contemporary American Transcendentalists (such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose essays on self-reliance she deeply admired) and by the work of earlier English writers like Charlotte Brontë and William Wordsworth. All these authors shared an interest in the lives of ordinary people and struggled for inner freedom in a 19th-century world that often demanded conformity.
Historical Context
Emily Dickinson lived in small-town Amherst, Massachusetts all her life. She grew up in a strict Protestant environment that placed great emphasis on religious rules and social codes (in fact, her family line can be traced back to the 16th-century Puritan settler John Winthrop). Though she ultimately rejected organized religion, her poems remain preoccupied with theological concerns (including the existence of an afterlife and competing ideas about the ways in which people ought to serve God). Dickinson's religious upbringing also manifests in the hymn-like rhythms of her poetry.
Dickinson wrote most of her poetry during the American Civil war, which ran from 1861 to 1865. She was firmly on the Union side of that bloody conflict; in one of her letters, she writes with delight about the ignominious defeat of Confederate president Jefferson Davis, who was reportedly trying to make his escape disguised in a woman's skirt when he was finally captured. She even contributed three anonymous poems—some of only a handful she published during her lifetime—to a fundraising magazine in support of the Union army.
However, Dickinson rarely addressed the political world around her directly in her poetry, preferring either to write about her immediate surroundings or to take a much wider philosophical perspective. And by all accounts, Dickinson's life was extremely unusual for the time. Most women were expected to marry and have children, but she never did; in fact, towards the end of her life, she barely spoke to anyone but a small circle of close friends and family. She spent most of her time shut up in her room, relatively immune to what was taking place outside in the wider world.
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More “Fame is a fickle food” Resources
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External Resources
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A Look at Dickinson's Life — A Poetry Foundation biography of one of the world's most beloved, and mysterious, poets.
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Dickinson's Personal Thoughts on Publication and Fame — A letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson in which Dickinson famously says, "If fame belonged to me, I could not escape her."
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The Emily Dickinson Museum — An online database of precious artifacts from Emily Dickinson's lifetime.
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The Poem in Dickinson's Handwriting — An archive of the original, handwritten poem.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Emily Dickinson
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