Emily Dickinson

Delight is as the flight,

DELIGHT is as the flight,

ratio

Mathematical term—Dickinson frames delight as a calculable proportion. The irony: you can't measure joy like the schools measure things.

Or in the ratio of it
As the schools would say.
The rainbow's way
A skein

skein

A coiled bundle of yarn. The rainbow isn't arched—it's tangled thread thrown across the sky, temporary and messy.

Flung colored after rain
Would suit as bright,
Except that flight

aliment

Food, nourishment. Flight feeds you; rainbows only look pretty. Delight has to sustain, not just dazzle.

Were aliment.
"If it would last?"
I asked the East
When that bent stripe

bent stripe

She refuses 'rainbow'—calls it a bent stripe. Child's-eye view: before you learn the poetic word, you see the thing itself.

Struck up my childish
Firmament,
And I for glee
Took rainbows as the common
Way,
And empty skies

eccentricity

The child thinks empty skies are weird and rainbows are normal. Delight as the default state—adulthood reverses this.

The eccentricity.
And so with lives;
And so with butterflies
Seen magic, through
The fright
That they will cheat the sight

cheat the sight

Butterflies vanish mid-flight. 'Cheat' implies betrayal—beauty owes us nothing but we feel robbed when it leaves.

dower latitudes

Dower: a widow's inheritance. The butterflies will give their beauty to distant places, leaving us nothing.

And dower latitudes far on
Some sudden morn,
Our portion in the fashion

fashion

Double meaning: manner/style, but also the cutting and shaping of cloth. Our portion of delight is cut short, the pattern complete.

Done.
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

Childhood's Inverted Economy

The poem's hinge is the child who thought rainbows were common / And empty skies / The eccentricity. Dickinson captures the moment before scarcity thinking sets in—when a child expects delight as the baseline and normalcy as the aberration. This isn't nostalgia. It's epistemology.

The "bent stripe" matters. She won't say 'rainbow' when describing the child's first encounter because children don't see categories—they see phenomena. The stripe "Struck up my childish / Firmament" like a match lighting a personal sky. That verb "struck" carries violence: beauty as shock, not comfort.

Adulthood reverses the economy. Now we "Seen magic, through / The fright"—we can't experience butterflies without simultaneously experiencing the terror of their departure. The phrase "cheat the sight" reveals the adult's transactional relationship with beauty: it owes us duration, and when it vanishes, we've been swindled. The child took rainbows as common and felt no such debt.

Flight as Nourishment

The rainbow fails Dickinson's test because it lacks "aliment"—food. This is the poem's strangest claim: delight must nourish, not merely appear. Flight feeds you; static beauty starves you. The rainbow is "Flung colored after rain" (passive, thrown), while flight implies agency, motion, metabolic burn.

"And so with lives; / And so with butterflies"—the parallelism makes human lives and butterfly lives interchangeable. Both are "Seen magic" (notice: not 'magical things' but the act of being perceived as magic) that will "dower latitudes far on". Dower is inheritance given to a widow—what's left after death. The butterflies and lives will give their beauty elsewhere, to distant latitudes, on "Some sudden morn." We get our portion, then the pattern is "Done"—finished like cut cloth.

The repetition of the opening stanza at the end isn't a refrain. It's the problem restated after the evidence. Delight remains "as the flight"—measured in ratios the schools can't actually teach, nourishing in ways rainbows can't match, gone before you finish asking if it will last.