I taste a liquor never brewed –
From Tankards scooped in Pearl –
Not all the Frankfort Berries
Yield such an Alcohol!
Inebriate of air – am I –
And Debauchee of Dew –
Reeling – thro' endless summer days –
From inns of molten Blue –
When "Landlords" turn the drunken Bee
Out of the Foxglove's door –
When Butterflies – renounce their "drams" –
I shall but drink the more!
Till Seraphs swing their snowy Hats –
And Saints – to windows run –
To see the little Tippler
Leaning against the – Sun!
---
Emily Dickinson
The opening of this poem is the key for its interpretation.
The poet drinks a liquor that was actually never brew, a liquor that does not exist if not in the imaginary world of the author. This is the summa of Dickinson's paradigm, concreteness that comes from abstraction. This is the utmost power of the poet, the ability of knowing the unknown, of seeing the unseen, of writing the unwritten.
The poet lets her imagination flow towards the myth and the transgression of legendary bacchanals, towards what for her was outlandish and enchantingly appealing. She sees precious Tankards from a distant Germany, where the masters of distillation and drunkenness stereotypically were placed. These Vats from the Rhine that probably only a few Germans know, and a fewer ever tasted.
But Dickinson declares the truth at the beginning of the second stanza. She is drunk of air and the only debauchery that she knows comes from dew. Her summer days are endless, presumably quite ordinary, and the only Inns she can attend are those offered by a bright blue sky. Alcohol? Not a single trace. She is drunk of nature, of pureness, of simplicity. Yet a simplicity that is rich and mincing, as nature can be to the eyes of the poet.
This is the joy and the torture of the author. For she will keep on drinking this 'poison' until the end of time, until the foxgloves will stop blooming and the butterflies will no longer collect pollen from the flowers. The addict Bee will be drinking more and more from the copious source.
The fourth and last stanza brings us to an upper level. We leave the Inns, the Rhine, the human dimension and limits, and we gaze up the sky, where benevolent Seraphs will shake the clouds or let the snow fall to greet the author and approve her behavior. This mention to the Seraphs and to Saints in the following verse shows that the poet is far far distant from common drunkenness and vulgar sinners.
Her drinking is spiritual, transcendental, metaphorical. It has to do with nature, with a religious approach to the concreteness of the objects and the inconsistency of the ideas.
Is she really happy about this? Happy to lean again the sun, as if she really were a tippler? Maybe yes, if we surrender to the thought that she was not 'just' a naive girl dreaming about the outside world built up in elegant yet unreal images, but a true rebel visionary, capable of getting drunk of her imagination.
