"Success is Counted Sweetest" is a lyric poem by Emily Dickinson written in 1859 and published anonymously in 1864. The poem uses the images of a victorious army and one dying warrior to suggest that only he who has suffered defeat can understand success.
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The poem was written in 1859 and first published anonymously in the Brooklyn Daily Union on April 27, 1864. It was republished (again, anonymously) by Helen Hunt Jackson in A Masque of Poets in 1878. Readers believed it was written by Ralph Waldo Emerson.[1] Its three unemotional quatrains are written in iambic trimeter with only line 5 in iambic tetrameter. Lines 1 and 3 (and others) end with extra syllables. The rhyme scheme is abcb. The poem's "success" theme is treated paradoxically: only those who know defeat can truly appreciate success. Alliteration enhances the poem's lyricism. The first stanza is a complete observation and can stand alone. Stanzas two and three introduce military images (a captured flag, a victorious army, a dying warrior) and are dependent upon one another for complete understanding.[2]
Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne'er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.
Not one of all the purple Host
Who took the Flag today
Can tell the definition
So clear of Victory
As he defeated—dying—
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Burst agonized and clear.
Harold Bloom indicates "Success" was one of Dickinson's earliest manuscript poems and one of only seven poems published during her lifetime. Its theme was one she returned to a number of times during her literary career, as in "Water, is taught by thirst". The poem, Bloom writes, is one of Dickinson's more "masculine" poems and "emphasizes the power of desire and equates desire with victory." From a Christian perspective, Bloom explains, the sounds bursting on the dying warrior's ear may be heavenly music as he passes to his eternal rest. Although Dickinson's poems are often read as poems of losing at romance, Bloom points out that the popularity of "Success" can be attributed to the fact that the poem's "message can be applied to any situation where there are winners and losers."[1]
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