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POEMS: Success Is Counted Sweetest |
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| Success
Is Counted Sweetest In this poem, Emily Dickinson writes about how people who live their life without achievement long to succeed in some manner. She makes note of how people with success often don't appreciate what they are able to accomplish in lines one and two: "Success is counted sweetest by those who ne'er succeed." Dickinson then focuses her attention on the field of battle where people fought over trivial goals. By taking over land and placing their flag high, they became proud of their accomplishments even though they had acquired only land. In the final quatrain, Dickinson switches roles and speaks on behalf of the dying man, who hears the victorious celebrate. To him, defeat is the loss of his life. The poem causes the reader to think about what success and failure are all about. To the man dying on the field of battle, merely living would have been a success beyond all measures. Instead, the men celebrating victory are those who captured a piece of earth. Dickinson uses each quatrain to relate a different perspective of success and need. In the first, she introduces how those who long for something they never have achieve a greater thrill of achievement than somebody who had the same thing the deprived sought for all along. In the second quatrain, she discusses the victorious soldiers who acquired something seemingly irrelevant to their existence. This thought is correlated in the final quatrain when the tragedy and longing of the wounded is revealed. The varying levels of needs and desires and loss are dramatically juxtapositioned and revealed. The main theme of this poem is that only the person seeking the final goal oftentimes defines success. To different people there are different levels of winning and losing, and what is held high and mighty to one might be irrelevant and inconsequential to another. |