Success_is_counted_sweetest

“Success is counted sweetest...”

Summary

The speaker says that “those who ne’er succeed” place the highest value on success. (They “count” it “sweetest”.) To understand the value of a nectar, the speaker says, one must feel “sorest need.” She says that the members of the victorious army (“the purple Host / Who took the flag today”) are not able to define victory as well as the defeated, dying man who hears from a distance the music of the victors.

Form

The three stanzas of this poem take the form of iambic trimeter—with the exception of the first two lines of the second stanza, which add a fourth stress at the end of the line. (Virtually all of Dickinson’s poems are written in an iambic meter that fluctu ates fluidly between three and four stresses.) As in most of Dickinson’s poems, the stanzas here rhyme according to an ABCB scheme, so that the second and fourth lines in each stanza constitute the stanza’s only rhyme.

Commentary

Many of Emily Dickinson’s most famous lyrics take the form of homilies, or short moral sayings, which appear quite simple but that actually describe complicated moral and psychological truths. “Success is counted sweetest” is such a poem; its first two lines express its homiletic p oint, that “Success is counted sweetest / By those who ne’er succeed” (or, more generally, that people tend to desire things more acutely when they do not have them). The subsequent lines then develop that axiomatic truth by offering a pair of images that exemplify it: the nectar—a symbol of triumph, luxury, “success”—can best be comprehended by someone who “needs” it; the defeated, dying man understands victory more clearly than the victorious army does. The poem exhibits Dickinson’s keen awareness of the complicated truths of human desire (in a later poem on a similar theme, she wrote that “Hunger—was a way / Of Persons outside Windows— / The Entering—takes away—”), and it shows the beginnings of her terse, compacted style, whereby complicated meanings are compressed into extremely short phrases (e.g., “On whose forbidden ear”). Success is counted sweetest’

Emily Dickinson looks at life from a unique perspective, making bizarre claims that often turn out to be accurate and show valuable insight into reality.

Dickinson’s poem “Success is counted sweetest” consists of three stanzas, each with a rime scheme of ABCB. The theme of the poem is that only those who have not been successful think that success is so important. The loser is the one who continues to crave success as the winner fades into a neutral state of emotion.

First Stanza: “Success is counted sweetest”

In the first stanza, the speaker declares that it is only those who “ne’er succeed” who have the notion that success is the best thing possible, or “counted sweetest.” Those who have not succeeded are the ones who crave it the most. They especially crave success more than the successful ones, because once one has succeeded the desire then dies.

And to understand how a desire works, one needs to have that desire: “To comprehend a nectar / Requires so rest need.” “A nectar” metaphorically represents the thing that is desired. Nectar is anything that is sweet, such as the secretions of flowers that attract bees. The term originates in mythology as the life-giving drink given by the gods.

Second Stanza: “Not one of all the purple Host”

In the second stanza, the speaker dramatizes a field victory as in hockey or football, saying that the winners cannot clearly state a definition of victory. “Purple Host” refers to the winning team. Some writers have asserted that Dickinson was referring to a Civil War battle in this poem, but she composed this poem 1859— two years before the Civil War began.

The second stanza is actually part of a complex sentence that continues into the third stanza.

Third Stanza: “As he defeated —dying”

As the second stanza began, the victors do not clearly understand victory. The third stanza finishes the thought. Those victors do not understand victory as well as the defeated understand it.

The speaker here exaggerates the notion of the defeated by saying they lay “dying”—this exaggeration is one of the reasons that readers may misunderstand and claim that the speaker is referring to a Civil War battle. But the ”forbidden ear” is not literally dying but merely suffering the defeat. To those who lost the game, according to this speaker, those “distant strains of triumph / Burt agonized and clear!”

The losers hear the cheering and the music played in the winners’ honor with different clarity than the winners do. The loser, by suffering defeat still has in his heart the deep desire to win, while the winners can merely wallow in the glow of victory.

A common idea in Dickinson's poems is that not having increases our appreciation or enjoyment of what we lack; the person who lacks (or does not have) understands whatever is lacking better than the person who possesses it. In this poem, the loser knows the meaning '"definition" of victory better than the winners. The implication is that he has "won" this knowledge by paying so high a price, with the anguish of defeat and with his death.

In stanza one, she repeats the s sound and, to a lesser degree, n. Why does she use this alliteration? i.e., are the words significant? "Sorest" is used with the older meaning of greatest, but can it also have the more common meaning? What are the associations of "nectar"--good, bad, indifferent? Does "nectar" pick up any word in the first line?

In stanza two, "purple" connotes royalty; the robes of kings and emperors were dyed purple. It is also the color of blood. Are these connotations appropriate to the poem? In a battle, what does a flag represent? Why is victory described in terms of taking the losing side's flag?

In stanza three, what words are connected by d sounds and by s sounds? Is there any reason for connecting or emphasizing these words? Dickinson is compressing language and omitting connections in the last three lines. The dying man's ears are not forbidden; rather, the sounds of triumph are forbidden to him because his side lost the battle. The triumphant sounds that he hears are not agonized, though they are clear to him; rather, he is agonized at hearing the clear sounds of triumph of the other side. They are "distant" literally in being far off and metaphorically in not being

part of his experience; defeat is the opposite of or "distant" from victory.

Type of Work and Year of Publication

Emily Dickinson's "Success Is Counted Sweetest" is a three-stanza lyric poem written in 1859.

Most of the lines in the poem are in iambic trimiter, sometimes with a catalectic syllable. The rhyme scheme is abcb. Author Helen Hunt Jackson, with whom Dickinson corresponded,

published the poem in 1878 in a collection, A Masque of Poets.

Themes

Only failures fully understand the meaning of success. Dickinson announces this theme in the first two lines: "Success is counted sweetest / By those who ne'er succeed."

Appreciating a boon requires privation. For example, a poor man who wins the lottery better appreciates his windfall than a millionaire executive who receives a six-figure bonus. The poet enunciates this theme when she says, "To comprehend a nectar / Requires sorest need." In Greek mythology, nectar was the drink of the gods, conferring on them immortality. In common usage, a nectar is any delectable drink or, figuratively, any uplifting experience.

Narration and Tone

The poet uses third-person narration in which she observes a battle and concludes that only the defeated warrior, hearing the enemy's noisy victory celebration, completely understands success. The tone is unemotional and impersonal; the poet is reporting and interpreting what she sees but refrains from expressing sympathy or compassion.

Use of Paradox

Paradox is the controlling figure of speech in the poem. It expresses the main theme: The person best qualified to evaluate the impact of success is the vanquished rather than the victor.

Implicit in this paradoxical observation is that it can apply to anyone: the failed author, the defeated boxer, the election loser, the rejected job applicant, the bankrupt businessman.

Use of Alliteration

Alliteration helps the poem achieve its lyricism. In the text of the poem, below, letters

highlighted in red, blue, and other colors indicate alliteration.

1.There are several techniques in the poem. The first is rhyming The

words that rhyme in her poem are "succeed/need", and "ear/clear". She also uses imagery in the last stanza (imagery is using the 5 senses to describe something). She describes, "On whose forbidden ear/the distant strains of triumph/Break, agonized and clear." She is describing the

sounds of triumph very descriptively, which is imagery. She also describes the army as a "purple Host", an image that fits with imagery.

Then, for figurative language techniques, there is a metaphor. She compares people who appreciate success the most to someone who appreciates nectar because they are starving. She says, "To comprehend a

nectar/requires sorest need." This enhances the point that she is making, that success often is counted the sweetest to those who have fought and struggled for it, and never tasted it.