page_title: I taste a liquor never brewed
section_title: Description
hierarchical_section_title: I taste a liquor never brewed / Description
caption_attribution_description: English: Manuscript copy of Emily Dickinson poem I taste a liquor never brewed. The source image was straightened and cropped of its black border.
context_page_description: "I taste a liquor never brewed" is a lyrical poem written by Emily Dickinson first published in the Springfield Daily Republican of 4 May 1861 from a now lost copy. Although titled "The May-Wine" by the Republican, Dickinson never titled the poem so it is commonly referred to by its first line.
  The poem celebrates Dickinson's intoxication with life in an ironic and transformative manner, drawing on themes of popular temperance reform of the time.
context_section_description: Emily Dickinson's manuscript version (as the poem appears today) differs significantly from the Republican version in the last two lines of the first verse and in its final line.
  The poem exhibits several typical features of Dickinson's poems. Like most of Dickinson's poems, it was written in ballad metre, iambic lines that alternate between four and three beats to the line. This is a less regular, more intimate, version of the common metre used in hymns such as Amazing Grace. The syllable count is not so strict and only the second and fourth lines are required to rhyme.
  Because I could not stop for Death,
  
  He kindly stopped for me;
  
  The Carriage held but just Ourselves
  
  And Immortality.
  — from Emily Dickinson's poem #712
  As in most of her poems, dashes typically replace punctuation and there is an idiosyncratic use of capitalization. These were edited from the poem by the Republican, but Emily regarded them as an integral part of her verse.
  The poem begins with a paradox (a liquor never brewed) and finishes with a striking image (a tippler supported by the sun rather than the traditional lamppost), both common devices in Dickinson's poetry. It employs slant rhyme in the first quatrain, where pearl is made to rhyme with alcohol. Dickinson was censured for this (precisely this example by Andrew Lang) by some early critics while others celebrated it as avant-garde. That Dickinson used the slant rhyme in her manuscript version (it is not in the Republican version) demonstrates she preferred it and indeed examples occur in most of her verse. She famously remarked, "Tell all the Truth, but tell it slant".
caption: Manuscript version in the Houghton Library (72a), J214, Fr207.[5]
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