Success - Emily Dickinson

´“Success” is counted sweetest´ it’s composed by three quatrains, four lines in each stanza. Emily Dickinson, through the entire poem used different literary devices to express her ideas. There is simple vocabulary, but a complex theme and she uses a detached impersonal tone. This poem’s message, carried ahead with different literary devices, is that those who succeed never truly appreciate it. Only those who fail, or who lack something, can truly appreciate how amazing it would be if they did succeed.

In the first stanza, Emily Dickinson, uses the word “nectar” as a symbol, and a metaphor of success. Lines 3 and 4 say that hunger creates value. Grief defeat is the path to understanding success. The only way to define success is to experience the contrary. Not only to feel but to mentally grasp it. In the two words “sorest, need” there’s contradiction, between positive and negative.

The dilemma presented by this poem is the question of ´what is left for the ones that always succeed? ´. Only the ones who “ne´er succeed” can refer as it as “sweetest” to succeed. The next two metaphors, “to comprehend a nectar” and “requires sorest need”, are speaking about need and desire, it means that one clearly appreciates success when it has failed too much, and when it was too far to ´touch it´. And the ones, who ever succeed, do not know the really feeling of having it; they lose their ability to appreciate it.

In the last two stanzas, Emily Dickinson compares the two sides of a battle, the winning and losing sides.

In the second stanza, she’s talking about the host, the army. She uses the word “flag” in line six as a metonymy of success. The word “flag” in a battle means success, but no one who took the flag, or won, could know well, or feel the same appreciation of victory than the soldiers who lose the battle.

In the third stanza she uses the word “dying” between dashes to emphasize the word. By the word dying she means an ultimate defeat. In the last three lines she talked about a forbidden ear. The dying man's ears were not forbidden, the sound of triumph was forbidden to them because this side of the army lost the battle. They listen the celebrations of triumph from the other army. They were “distant” in being not part of the experience of winning the battle, and the celebration, “distant” from victory. In the last line there is paradox between the words “agonized”, and “clear”, these are two words that do not match.

In conclusion, the message of the poem is that the ones who ever triumph would never know the real taste of succeeding, not like the ones who are hunger of victory.

...