Emily Dickinson I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed

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A House of Joy Discussion of Emily Dickinson´s „I taste a liquor never brewed.“ We have an I - an I that tastes, drinks, gets drunk on something delicious, never brewed by man. A liquor that not even German wine can yield. The I gets drunk by small, perl-like, precious portions. It´s not much of it that´s needed. Small potions. Nature holds and offers it all. To her - the I of the poem. It´s the air and the dew that make her drunk, that seduce her, that make her tumble. She drinks it, inns everywhere, outside, inside, all summer long. She takes it from the blue, the colour that has become liquid, that is molten. She inhales it from the sky, heavenlike drink, from the ocean, from the colour itself. Is there a melancholy in it, that blue contains, or a cleareness? Bees and butterflies will stop to drink in autumn days, will die: But she - she will continue to drink, even more in fall, not ending even in winter. Winter will see her walking around as a little tippler, drunken still. And it´s then that angels will bow their heads like snowy tree-tops and saints will look out of their windows, poetic windows perhaps, to see her, leaning against the - Sun - standing, feeling warm in the midst of the cold winter. Even sunny winter days hold the rays of the sun. Rays that keep her warm, that she can lean on. They might point to the spring, an everlasting circle, an continuing inebriation. Poetic are seraphs and saints, they can see trough windows of imagination as well as she can. So she might talk of her poetic vision, her imagination, that yield such exceptional alcohol. Emily Dickinson enjoys her inebration. Enjoys this immoral act, is turning away from good taste or judgement, but she feels the sensual pleasure of her own thought, of her imagination that she dwells in. A house of ”Possibility" again. It is her subjectivity she enjoys an individuality that real
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