Figurative Language 4- I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed

"Inebriate of air--I am--" line 5

This poem by Emily Dickinson has very similar format to "I Felt a Funeral in my Brain." So, in analyzing this poem, I took the same approach that we did in class. Literally, the speaker is describing intoxication. In the poem she is drunk. Many words lend themselves to this literal meaning such as; liquor, Tankards, Vats, alcohol, Inebriate, drunken, and several others. However, following the analysis of the previous Emily Dickinson poem, I searched for an alternate meaning. I found that the description of intoxication is an extended metaphor for the speakers overwhelming love of summer and nature. The speaker is expressing that she will love summer nature until the day she dies. The title in itself exhibits the metaphor. "I taste a liquor never brewed" refers to the pleasurable intoxicated feeling without having had a sip of alcohol. The sense of summer and nature cause the speaker to feel elated as if she were intoxicated. Words such as "air, dew, foxglove, bee, butterflies, and endless summer days" led to my conclusion that the speaker wanted to take in all the summer nature she could.