The Full Text of “I taste a liquor never brewed”
1I taste a liquor never brewed –
2From Tankards scooped in Pearl –
3Not all the Frankfort Berries
4Yield such an Alcohol!
5Inebriate of air – am I –
6And Debauchee of Dew –
7Reeling – thro' endless summer days –
8From inns of molten Blue –
9When "Landlords" turn the drunken Bee
10Out of the Foxglove's door –
11When Butterflies – renounce their "drams" –
12I shall but drink the more!
13Till Seraphs swing their snowy Hats –
14And Saints – to windows run –
15To see the little Tippler
16Leaning against the – Sun!
The Full Text of “I taste a liquor never brewed”
1I taste a liquor never brewed –
2From Tankards scooped in Pearl –
3Not all the Frankfort Berries
4Yield such an Alcohol!
5Inebriate of air – am I –
6And Debauchee of Dew –
7Reeling – thro' endless summer days –
8From inns of molten Blue –
9When "Landlords" turn the drunken Bee
10Out of the Foxglove's door –
11When Butterflies – renounce their "drams" –
12I shall but drink the more!
13Till Seraphs swing their snowy Hats –
14And Saints – to windows run –
15To see the little Tippler
16Leaning against the – Sun!
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“I taste a liquor never brewed” Introduction
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Emily Dickinson's "I taste a liquor never brewed" is about getting completely drunk—not on booze, but on life. On a glorious summer day, the poem's speaker imagines drinking so deeply and joyously of nature's beauty that even the angels run to their windows to watch the speaker's happy shenanigans. First appearing in 1861 in the newspaper the Springfield Daily Republican, this is one of only a few of Dickinson's poems published in her lifetime (though, as usual, the editors of the paper where it was first published messed around with her distinctive style).
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“I taste a liquor never brewed” Summary
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I'm drinking a mysterious liquor that doesn't exist from a gorgeous pearly mug. Even the famous wine grapes of the Rhine valley couldn't produce a liquor like this one!
I'm getting drunk on the air and can't get enough of the dew. I stagger through gorgeous, infinite summer days, stopping to gaze at the burning blue sky like a drunk stops at pubs.
Even when the flowers' bartenders kick out bees that have gotten drunk, and the butterflies swear off their sips of nectar, I'll keep on drinking—until even the angels swing their white hats about and the saints rush to stare at me as I lean like a wobbly drunkard against the sun!
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“I taste a liquor never brewed” Themes
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Appreciating the Glory of Nature
The speaker in “I taste a liquor never brewed” is getting drunk (metaphorically) on the loveliness of a summer day. The speaker has a bottomless thirst for nature’s beauty, becoming so deeply connected to the landscape that the speaker out-wilds the animals—getting drunker than even the bees and butterflies sipping on nectar. The poem thus celebrates the intoxicating glory of nature.
The speaker begins by describing a mysterious beverage, something so impossibly good it seems magical. This "liquor" is, confusingly, "never brewed"—that is, this beverage isn't actually something made by human beings. But though the poem is coy at first about exactly what the speaker's tasting, the opening lines give readers a sense that, whatever this liquor is, it’s really something special. For one thing, it’s served in “Tankards scooped in Pearl,” fairy-tale-ish vessels, and it outclasses even “Frankfort Berries”—wine grapes from the famous Rhine vineyards, some of the best in the world.
Only in the second and third stanzas do readers learn that this magical liquor is nothing more (or less) than the air, the dew, the flowers, and the summer sky—the natural world, with all its bounty and wonder. Nature has become, to the speaker, rich, magical, and, of course, intoxicating. The summer day is “endless,” and the sky becomes an infinite series of “inns of molten Blue.” The speaker does indeed feel inebriated, but this isn't the result of partaking in any illicit substances: the speaker is basically drunk on life itself.
And though the pleasures the speaker revels in are wholesome, the speaker's pleasure in them is outlandish. The speaker is a “debauchee,” so drunk on nature that the speaker has become joyfully wild. In fact, the speaker is wilder than wild: this person can out-party the bees and butterflies drinking their fill in the flowers. The speaker's going to be the last one out the door at this summer-day bar.
The speaker’s innocently wild nature-drunkenness is so pronounced, in fact, that it attracts the attention of heaven itself. “Seraphs” and “Saints”—usually imagined as lofty, serene, and holy—become town gossips, swinging their hats around and rushing to windows to see the life-drunk speaker wobbling around. And the speaker's drunkenness has lifted this person so far off the everyday ground that the speaker feels able to lean against the sun itself. The speaker’s joyful inebriation thus brings heaven down to earth at the same time as it raises earth to heaven. A normal (if lovely) day has become sublime through the speaker's nature-drunkenness, and celestial beings have become the speaker's next-door neighbors.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “I taste a liquor never brewed”
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Lines 1-4
I taste a liquor never brewed –
From Tankards scooped in Pearl –
Not all the Frankfort Berries
Yield such an Alcohol!The speaker starts right in the middle of the action—in the first person and the present tense: even now, the speaker tastes the mysterious liquor that's going to motivate the entire poem.
The speaker's mysterious drink seems paradoxical, maybe magical. If it's never been brewed, how is the speaker tasting it? The description of the vessels from which the speaker is drinking also suggests that something out of the ordinary is going on here. "Tankards scooped in Pearl" are the kind of drinking mugs one might find in a fairy tale, gorgeous objects made from precious materials. The assonance of "brewed" and "scooped" helps the reader to feel the delectable rarity of the drink and the vessel: those matched, cool /oo/ sounds are like lips puckering to sip a drink, or like the "ooh!" of delight people might make when they taste something delicious.
The next lines only strengthen the reader's sense that the speaker is having an extraordinary experience. The very best wine in the world, made from Rhine valley grapes, can't match the mysterious beverage the speaker's drinking.
Taken together, these lines give the reader the feeling that the speaker is having, not just a good time, but a magically good time. But the sense of mysterious delight in these first lines works almost like the setup for a joke. The speaker is definitely having some serious fun—but as the reader will soon discover, it's the kind of fun that's as down-to-earth as it is transcendent. It's maybe even a little silly.
This opening stanza also makes clear that the speaker will tell readers about this liquor in lilting ballad meter, the rhythm of old songs and old rhymes. Like much of Dickinson's poetry, this poem is made up of quatrains with an ABCB rhyme scheme. That means lines 2 and 3 rhyme, but lines 1 and 2 do not. In this first stanza, though, those rhyme sounds are slant rhymes (another common feature of Dickinson's poetry): "Pearl" doesn't rhyme perfectly with "Alcohol," suggesting the speaker's drunken dizziness.
The meter of the poem, in keeping with its ballad form, consists of alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter. Recall that an iamb is a poetic foot with an unstressed-stressed, da-DUM, beat pattern; tetrameter just means there are four of these iambs per line, while trimeter means that there are three. Take lines 1-2:
I taste a liquor never brewed –
From Tankards scooped in Pearl –This is a bouncy, familiar meter that is appropriate for the speaker's light-hearted, joyful tone.
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Lines 5-6
Inebriate of air – am I –
And Debauchee of Dew – -
Lines 7-8
Reeling – thro' endless summer days –
From inns of molten Blue – -
Lines 9-12
When "Landlords" turn the drunken Bee
Out of the Foxglove's door –
When Butterflies – renounce their "drams" –
I shall but drink the more! -
Lines 13-14
Till Seraphs swing their snowy Hats –
And Saints – to windows run – -
Lines 15-16
To see the little Tippler
Leaning against the – Sun!
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“I taste a liquor never brewed” Symbols
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Alcohol and Drunkenness
Drunkenness is the big governing symbol of "I taste a liquor never brewed"—the backbone of the poem's central extended metaphor. The speaker is drunk on the beautiful summertime world, and only plans to get drunker.
So the reader has to ask: what does drunkenness mean? When a person gets drunk, they seem to lose their inhibitions, to be freer and wilder. They become emotionally looser, feeling their feelings more strongly. The speaker isn't literally drunk in the poem, but rather uses language related to alcohol and drunkenness to represent the boundless joy, and freedom the speaker experiences when partaking in the delights of the natural world.
Here, then, the speaker's drunkenness is a wholesome one. It's nature that has made the speaker feel wild and exuberant and emotive. Nature, this symbolism suggests, is potent, freeing, and delightful as any alcohol. And luckily for the speaker, those "endless summer days" don't tend to result in a hangover (but maybe a sunburn!).
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Flowers
Flowers spring up everywhere in poetry, and the poets of the English and American Romantic movements (of whom Dickinson is one) especially loved their flowers. (Take a look at William Wordsworth's "I wandered lonely as a cloud" for just one famous example.) Associated with spring and summer, flowers often represent hope, youth, beauty, and rebirth.
The symbolic resonance of the foxgloves here, in addition to giving readers a picture of the kind of cottage-garden where one might find them, thus contribute to the poem's feeling of fresh, lively joy—a joy that endlessly renews. The speaker can get just as drunk on the enlivening beauty of the foxgloves as the bees can get drunk on their nectar.
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The Sun and the Sky
The vastness, beauty, and power of the sky are a big part of the speaker's experience of nature in this poem. The sky is a common symbol of freedom, expansiveness, imagination, and joy, and it serves all these roles here. This sky is so blue that it's "molten"—melting-hot—but it's also an "inn," a place to get drunk. The speaker consumes a potent feeling of liberation and joy from a sky that is both a little bit dangerous, and a little bit domesticated.
Similarly, when the speaker leans against the sun in the poem's last line, there's a feeling of deep engagement with the powerful life-giving energy that the sun traditionally represents. To lean against the sun the way one would lean against a wall is a low-key, everyday gesture; the juxtaposition of tipsy staggering with the sun itself suggests that the speaker has absorbed some sun-power—some of that life-giving energy—through this nature-drunkenness.
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“I taste a liquor never brewed” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Alliteration
There's a great deal of alliteration in "I taste a liquor never brewed," and it helps to develop the sense that the speaker is relishing her day.
Alliteration can serve a lot of different purposes in a poem, but there's one thing it almost always does: it just makes things sound better. Take the pleasant alliteration in a line like "Debauchee of Dew." (The alliteration there also helps to create the sense the the "Debauchee of Dew" might almost be a noble title, like the Duchess of Devonshire.)
Similarities between sounds might also link up with the speaker's feeling of being in joyful harmony with nature. After all, the speaker summer-drunk enough to actually lean on the sun—an image of a relationship with nature so close that it makes the greatest powers of the heavens approachable. Alliteration here helps to create feelings of connection and ease. To "taste" from "Tankards" similarly creates a link between what the speaker's actions and the physical world, making her lively motions feel connected to the material things around her.
All the assonance on /s/ sounds in the last stanza has its own name: sibilance. That sibilance might mimic the gossipy whispers of the angels and saints who are rushing to their windows to watch the speaker's drunken staggering. Check out the "Poetic Devices" entry on "sibilance" for more on how /s/ sounds work here.
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Assonance
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Consonance
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Caesura
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Personification
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Metaphor
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Enjambment
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Sibilance
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Allusion
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"I taste a liquor never brewed" 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.
- Liquor
- Tankards
- Pearl
- Frankfort Berries
- Inebriate
- Debauchee
- Reeling
- Thro'
- Inns
- Molten
- Landlords
- Foxglove
- Drams
- Seraphs
- Tippler
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An alcoholic drink.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “I taste a liquor never brewed”
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Form
Like much of Dickinson's work, "I taste a liquor never brewed" features the singsongy rhythm of ballad stanzas. It's made up of four quatrains, or four-line stanzas, each of which have an ABCB rhyme scheme and feature a mix of iambic tetrameter and trimeter, a.k.a. common meter (see the "Meter" and "Rhyme Scheme" sections for more on this).
The simplicity of Dickinson's form here matches the simplicity of the speaker's delight in nature. There's something mischievous about the way that the speaker uses this nursery-rhyme shape to describe a feeling that's both innocent and naughty: the speaker is staggering drunk in the middle of the day, but only on the beauty of summer. The form the speaker chooses is well-matched to the subject and a little subversive at the same time.
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Meter
In "I taste a liquor never brewed," Dickinson uses one of her favorite meters: ballad meter, a pattern that alternates between four and three iambs (poetic feet with a da-DUM rhythm) per line. Take lines 1-2:
I taste a liquor never brewed –
From Tankards scooped in Pearl –Ballad meter is almost identical to common meter, which Dickinson also uses all the time; the only difference is the rhyme scheme, which goes ABCB in ballad meter, ABAB in common meter. (See the "Rhyme Scheme" section for more.) It's a down-to-earth, uncomplicated meter, often found in nursery rhymes and folk songs.
Here, a few variations help the meter of the poem to match the matter of the poem. Take a look at lines 15 and 16:
To see the little Tippler
Leaning against the – Sun!The meter in these lines mimics the "little Tippler": the stresses wobble around, fall off balance, and come to a rest against the word "Sun." (The hiccupy caesura in the last line helps with this effect, too—take a look at the "Poetic Devices" section for more on that.)
A similar thing happens in line 7, which, like line 16 quoted above, opens with a trochee (a foot that goes stressed-unstressed, DUM-da):
Reeling – thro' endless summer days –
This hiccup in the meter again reflects the poem's content, as though the speaker's drunken "reeling" has affected the steady plod of the poem itself.
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Rhyme Scheme
"I taste a liquor never brewed" uses a rhyme scheme common in Dickinson's poems (and pretty common in general):
ABCB
However, the first stanza breaks slightly away from this pattern in its use of slant rhyme: "Pearl" and "Alcohol" don't exactly rhyme, but their ending sounds share a distant family resemblance. The rest of the poem's rhyming is straightforward, though, matching "Dew" and "Blue," "door" and "more," and "run" and "Sun."
This straightforward rhyme scheme is a favorite of Dickinson's, and it sometimes hides the complexity of her poetry behind a plain exterior. Here, it fits neatly with the poem's youthful giddiness: a simple rhyme scheme for the simple pleasures of a summer day.
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“I taste a liquor never brewed” Speaker
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The speaker of "I taste a liquor never brewed" is, like the speaker of many Dickinson poems, a first-person observer, immersed in the landscape being described. Though often conflated with Dickinson herself, there's no indication of the speaker's gender in the poem. What readers know is that this person is passionate and nature-loving, fully willing to embrace the beauty of the world. The lack of specific identifiers like an age or gender help the poem feel universal; anyone who's felt drunk with joy on a summer day might see themselves in these lines.
Readers may also get the feeling that the speaker feels a little bit silly even while rapturously enjoying the day. The speaker's description as "the little Tippler" gives the reader a sense that there's something touchingly childish about the speaker as they drink in the summertime (and maybe something goofy in that childishness).
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“I taste a liquor never brewed” Setting
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"I taste a liquor never brewed" is set in a beautiful sunlit countryside: a landscape of butterflies and bees drinking from flowers under a huge, hot-blue sky. This isn't wild nature, but something more approachable: the speaker's reference to "foxgloves" suggests cottage gardens more than wildflowers, and the image of nature becoming something like a series of inns (that is, pubs or bars) also places the reader in a domesticated natural world. The reader can imagine the speaker moving joyfully through a rural landscape—one where the feeling of life-drunk freedom might liberate the speaker from worry about the gossipy small-town neighbors hinted at in the fourth stanza.
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Literary and Historical Context of “I taste a liquor never brewed”
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Literary Context
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was a completely original writer: she may belong to the American Romantic movement according to time period and subject matter, but she doesn't sound like anyone else. Her poetic innovations lead some critics to think of her as a proto-Modernist—that is, a precursor of psychologically subtle and experimental 20th-century writers like Virginia Woolf. Among Dickinson's contemporaries, Walt Whitman is maybe the most useful point of comparison: he, like her, was a literary experimenter and a nature-lover.
Dickinson's poetry was deeply influenced by the English Romantics, like Wordsworth and Coleridge, whose use of ballad meter and interest in nature, childhood, and the soul are all reflected in her work. She was also an enthusiastic reader of the Victorian English novelist Charlotte Bronte, Shakespeare, and contemporary American transcendentalist writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Historical Context
Emily Dickinson wrote "I taste a liquor never brewed" during a tempestuous era of American politics. The poem was first published in the early days of the Civil War. Reaching out to the beauty of nature was one way that a lot of American poets of the era dealt with the fear and grief of this period; like Whitman, Dickinson found hope of renewal, transcendence, and eternity in nature.
But this poem is also responding to politics that were a little less dramatic and a little closer to home: the anti-alcohol Temperance movement. Some form of loosely organized anti-alcohol movement had been around in America for a long time, and it would stick around for long after Dickinson's death—famously leading to the Prohibition era. Temperance was having a moment of popularity in Massachusetts (where Dickinson spent her whole life) during Dickinson's lifetime. Her image of angels running to their windows to gossip about the "little Tippler" might have something to do with judgmental small-town attitudes toward drinkers.
It's also worth noting that Dickinson's poetry emerged from what, from the outside, looked like a sheltered life. She was shy and reclusive, never married, and died young; most of her poetry was only discovered and published after her death. Her quiet exterior disguised a passionate emotional and artistic life, full of intense romantic attachments and profound engagement with mystery.
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More “I taste a liquor never brewed” Resources
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External Resources
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Drunken Bees — Though Dickinson isn't being literal in this poem, bees can, in fact, get a little tipsy when drinking nectar that has fermented. Check out this article to learn more!
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Dickinson's Handwriting — See the original manuscript of the poem.
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A reading of the poem — A reader with a slight Irish accent performs the poem—in a different version. Spot the differences!
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Dickinson's Life — Additional biographical information on Dickinson, plus links to more of her poems, from the Poetry Foundation.
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The Emily Dickinson Museum — Take a look at the museum housed in Dickinson's former home in Amherst, Massachusetts.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Emily Dickinson
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