I taste a Liquor never brewed / Emily Dickinson

"I taste a liquor never brewed" is a poem written by American writer Emily Dickinson. Dickinson never titled the poem (known as #214), so it is commonly referred to by its first line.

The speaker in Emily Dickinson’s “I taste a liquor never brewed” is describing a mystical state that she experiences through her soul awareness; the state is so overwhelmingly uplifting that she feels as if she had become intoxicated by drinking alcohol. But there is vast difference between her spiritual intoxication and the literal, physical intoxication of drinking an inebriating beverage. The poem consists of four four-line stanzas. The second and fourth lines in each stanza rhyme, with the first rhyme pair “Pearl” and “Alcohol” being near or slant rhyme. The poem is #214 in Thomas H. Johnson’s The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson.

Stanza 1 – “I taste a liquor never brewed”
In the first stanza, the speaker begins the extended alcohol/intoxication metaphor by claiming that she experiences a state of awareness that she has rarely, if ever, heard described before. At this point, she likens this experience to being drunk, but the “liquor” that made her drunk is not “brewed”; in other words, her intoxication is not caused by the physical ingestion of a drink. The next line, “From Tankards scooped in Pearl,” describes the cup from which the speaker has drunk. Again she must resort to metaphor to express where this feeling comes from, because the experience is from the soul, or spiritual level of being, which is ineffable and cannot be described exactly in words, but can only be experienced. So when she claims that the tankards or large mugs are “scooped in Pearl,” she places them outside physical reality just as she has done when she said she “taste[s] a liquor never brewed.”

Stanza 2 – “Inebriate of Air – am I –”
Even though her state of mind is ineffable, she continues to dramatize the feeling by continuing to liken it to natural experiences; thus, she claims she is simply drunk on air, merely breathing makes her feel inebriated. And even the “Dew” makes her feel drunk. And the “endless summer days” make her feel as though she has been imbibing at “Inns of Molten Blue.” It’s as if the sky was one huge tavern from which the liquor flowed, and after she had drunk her fill, she goes “reeling” from the intoxication through those “endless summer days.”

Stanza 3 – “When ‘Landlords’ turn the drunken Bee”
Next, the speaker likens the bees and butterflies to fellow drinkers, whom she will out drink. After the flower, from which the bee is imbibing, closes up and the bee has to leave or be trapped, and after the butterflies have had their fill of securing nectar from the flowers, the speaker will be able to continue drinking her soul-intoxication, because it is not physical and, therefore, has no limit.

Stanza 4 – “Till Seraphs swing their snowy Hats –”
In the final stanza, the speaker reveals when she will have to stop drinking her special intoxicating beverage, and that time is never. The last line in stanza three claimed, “I shall but drink the more!” And although the sentence seems to end, the idea continues in the next stanza with “Till”—I shall continue drinking until the highest order of angels remove their “snowy Hats,” and saints hurry to the windows to watch me “Leaning against the – Sun –“; and these events will never take place: seraphs do not wear hats, and saints would hardly be interested in peering through windows to observe a “little tippler.” The poem, in the Johnson version, ends with a dash – indicating further that the speaker never has to stop her drinking, as those drinking the literal alcohol must.