Emily Dickinson

I taste a liquor never brewed

I TASTE a liquor never brewed,

tankards scooped in pearl

Not pearl-handled tankards—tankards *made* from pearl. She's drinking from flowers (dewdrops in petals). The luxury language makes nature intoxicating.

From tankards scooped in pearl;
Not all the vats upon the Rhine
Yield such an alcohol!
Inebriate of air am I,
And debauchee of dew,
Reeling, through endless summer days,
From inns of molten blue.

inns of molten blue

Inns = flowers where bees drink nectar. 'Molten blue' = the sky itself becomes a tavern. She's outdoing the actual drunk insects.

When landlords turn the drunken bee

foxglove's door

Foxglove flowers are literally tubular—bees crawl inside them. When they close at night, bees get kicked out. She stays drunk.

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

little tippler

She calls herself 'little'—a tiny drunk compared to cosmic scale. But she's the one who outlasts bees, butterflies, and scandalizes heaven.

Leaning against the sun!
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

The Drunkenness Metaphor

Dickinson uses intoxication vocabulary—debauchee, reeling, drams, tippler—to describe her response to nature. But notice the escalation: she starts by comparing herself to Rhine wine (stanza 1), then claims she's drunker than actual nectar-drinking insects (stanza 2-3), then ends so drunk she has to lean on the *sun* while heaven watches in shock.

The poem's central joke is that she's "Inebriate of air" and "debauchee of dew"—drunk on nothing, or on everything. Air and dew are free, infinite, and everywhere. Unlike Rhine wine (expensive, limited), her intoxicant never runs out. The "endless summer days" in line 7 aren't just long afternoons—they're her permanent state.

Stanza 3 is the turn: "When landlords turn the drunken bee / Out of the foxglove's door." Real bees get cut off when flowers close at night. Butterflies stop drinking ("renounce their drams"). She promises "I shall but drink the more!" She's claiming to out-drunk nature itself—to be more devoted to ecstasy than creatures who literally live on nectar.

Scandalizing Heaven

The final stanza explodes the scale. Seraphs (the highest order of angels) and saints rush to heaven's windows like shocked neighbors watching a scandal. The image of her "Leaning against the sun" is both cosmic and comic—she's so drunk she needs the sun for support, but also intimate enough with it to use it as a lamppost.

CONTEXT Dickinson rarely left her house in Amherst, Massachusetts, and never published this poem in her lifetime. She wrote it around 1860, during her most prolific period. The poem was published posthumously in 1861 in the *Springfield Republican* with heavy edits—editors changed "tippler" to "toper" and smoothed out her dashes.

The "little tippler" is crucial. She diminishes herself in size but maximizes herself in capacity for joy. Heaven's residents aren't angry—they're running to *see* her, like she's a spectacle. The poem argues that her private ecstasy (literally: standing outside oneself) is worth divine attention. For a reclusive poet, that's a bold claim: my inner life is cosmic theater.