#214 I taste a never brewed, From tankards scooped in pearl; Not all the vats upon the Rhine Yield such an alcohol! of am I, And of dew, Reeling, through endless summer days, From inns of molten blue. When landlords turn the drunken bee Out of the foxglove's door, When butterflies renounce their drams, I shall but drink the more! Till seraphs swing their snowy hats, And saints to windows run, To see the Leaning against the sun! --Emily Dickinson (1) In #214, Emily Dickinson gives us a riddling allegory of a little tippler drunk on nature--sky, flower, and dew. Kin to butterfly and bee, this being soars through the fiery blue sky, quaffs the intoxicating guzzles down the nectar of flowers, and bathes in the morning dew. The sensibilities and activities of this speaker are ecstatic, acrobatic, and otherworldly, worthy of observation and awe. In purity of sensation and height of feeling, this being challenges seraph, saint, and summer sun. The answer to the riddle, a hummingbird, is important to uncover. Whatever else it might intend and do, the poem also serves as a description and appreciation of this natural being. But the central purpose of the poem is to express the process of identification with the hummingbird, and the psychological sources and consequences of this identification as a mode of being and becoming for the speaker (and therefore for us, as readers). To identify with a hummingbird so completely is to assume a merger of subject and object, perceiver and perceived, an ecstatic overcoming of the divorce between conscious and unconscious, outer and inner, that is at the source of so much tension and anxiety in human experience. Temporally this centers the poem in cyclical time--heavenly time--where subject and object are still one, the need for unification of subject and object does not even arise, and access to heights of experience comes through a psychological regression from volition to emotion to sensation, and by this means, to imagination, rather than the other way around (i.e., from sensation, to emotion, to volition, to imagination), as in the more natural course of human growth, maturity, and self-realization. For hummingbird/speaker, this romantic regression begins in interaction with the natural world, which is expressed with linear forms. In the narrative materials of the poem, this interaction is represented by the allegorical landlords, who control the blossoming that the hummingbird/speaker feeds upon; the allegorical doors of the inns, the groves and gardens that supply the flowers that yield the natural liquor that inspires and transports; the air, the medium that enables this interaction; and, negatively, and therefore more obliquely, rivers, like the Rhine, whose occupants and their man-made liquors suffer by comparison to the natural delights of the hummingbird/speaker, and the run[ning] of the human observers (saints, children?) to the windows to view the spectacle of the astonishing hummingbird/speaker's feeding and flight. Various other linear forms in the poem (sonic, syntactic, rhetorical) also express this interaction between subjects and objects, world and mind. The most striking names for the poet/hummingbird, Inebriate of air and debauchee of dew are logically metonymic. The hummingbird/speaker is affected by and dew, and becomes the resulting attributes of those effects. Many interactions in the poem are appropriately expressed in transitive clauses (see, swing, turn, taste, yield, renounce). The excesses of the hummingbird/speaker are expressed prominently with a future time reference (I shall but drink the more!). At line end, one of the sound linkages is not rhyme but consonance (pearl-alcohor), the linear sound scheme. And the dominant grammmetric of the poem is clausal, which gives lines a dynamic, linear feel, as they drive across the page from subject/verb to object/complement/adverbial (or when rearranged, at least represent this process): I I taste a never brewed, of am I, Reeling, through endless summer days, When butterflies renounce their drams, I shall but drink the more! …