Emily Dickinson's Success Is Counted Sweetest

Emily Dickinson’s “Success is counted sweetest” is a poem that describes the longing for success from someone who never achieves it. Throughout the poem she provides metaphors that further explain her opinion of success: it is “most meaningful when it is in the minds of those who have only known failure” (Explanation Par. 2). In her famous biography “This was a Poet”, the author, George Frisbie Whicher, states that this poem is “the perception of value won through deprivation” (Explanation Par.4). The persona of the poem compares success to three examples: nectar, the flag of victory, and the drums of war. First, she says “to comprehend a nectar, requires sorest need” (ln. 3&4). This line is a metaphor Dickinson uses to describe that in order to understand the importance and luxury of the “nectar”, you must be in desperate need of it. In other words, you don’t know what you have until it’s gone. In the second stanza,

The author correlates the value of success with a soldier hearing “The distant strains of triumph/Burst agonized and clear!” in the background as he lay dying on the battlefield. (ln. 11 & 12) Dickinson uses vocabulary such as “strains of triumph” and “burst agonized” to help portray just how much the defeated soldier longs to be on the opposing side. “Success is counted sweetest” is one of Emily Dickinson’s most famous poems and one of the only poems she saw published in her lifetime. (Overview Par. 1) Even though it was published anonymously, it can be concluded that the poem meant a great deal to her. It is ironic that Dickinson wrote a poem of such longing for success when she didn’t receive the proper praise and attention for her “poetic genius” until after her death. (Explanation Par. 3) Her comparisons to success– nectar, the flag of victory, and drums of war- describe her “skeptical value of success in human affairs” (Explanation Par.