18 pages • 36 minutes read
Emily DickinsonFame Is a Fickle Food (1702)
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1914A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Form and Meter
“Fame is a fickle food” is written in unpunctuated free verse. It is 10 lines long. Dickinson’s lines are between six and three syllables long: Lines 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, and 10 have six syllables, Lines 3 and 8 have five syllables, and Lines 4 and 9 have three syllables. This reveals a pattern of two lines with six syllables, one line with five syllables, and one line with three syllables, followed by three lines with six syllables, one line with five syllables, and one line with three syllables, ending with a 10-syllable line. However, the variations in this pattern—the growing number of six-syllable lines before the subsequent lines shrink to five and three syllables—defies most metrical forms. The final line, Line 10, scans as iambic (has a pattern of each unstressed syllable being followed by a stressed syllable); however, her other lines resist any sort of regularity in metrical scansion.
Dickinson also resists formal language, instead utilizing plain style. While there is a slant rhyme, or near-rhyme, in Lines 5 and 6 (set/inspect), other poems by Dickinson more clearly exhibit her particular use of slant rhyme. “Fame is a fickle food” has elements from the elegy form. According to The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, “Most literary historians have understood elegy as closely linked to the history, theory, and decorum of cultural practices of mourning” (338). Dickinson’s direct language of death, “die” (Line 10), as well as her indirect symbols of death, like “crows” (Line 6), give this poem its elegiac tone.
Enjambment
Dickinson is well-known for her use of enjambment, or the breaking of a sentence over multiple lines. The line breaks in “Fame is a fickle food” have a variety of grammatical functions, taking the place of punctuation marks. For instance, the line breaks that precede “Whose”—line breaks between Lines 2 and 3, as well as Lines 5 and 6—take the place of commas.
The line break between Lines 9 and 10 can be read as a period. Line 10 is a complete sentence, and Line 9 completes the clause about the crows that begins with “whose” (Line 6). Some editors add an em dash between Lines 9 and 10, which is reminiscent of Dickinson’s use of em dashes in place of periods (or semicolons) in other poems. However, her manuscript, in her own handwriting, did not include any punctuation for “Fame is a fickle food”; enjambment is the only real guide to the grammar or sentence structure of this poem.
Alliteration
Throughout this poem and her entire body of work, Dickinson uses alliteration, or the repetition of the first letter of several words that are placed close to one another. In addition to the first line’s alliteration of the letter “f” (fame, fickle, and food), Dickinson repeats the initial consonant “c” in Lines 6 and 7—crows, crumbs, and caw. Line 9 echoes this alliteration with “corn”; the “c” words separate the actions of the crows from the actions of “men” (Line 10), which do not include words that begin with “c.”
The fame-hungry people are described using words that begin with the letter “s”—such as second and set (Line 5)—as well as the aforementioned words that begin with the letter “f.” The “f” alliteration returns in Lines 8 and 9 with the words “Flap” (Line 8) and “Farmer” (Line 9), harkening back to the beginning of the poem.
Consonance
The descriptions of both humans and crows include consonance, or the repetition of letters (consonants) at the ends of words. According to The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Dickinson “employed consonance often in place of end-rhyme” (300). In “Fame is a fickle food,” the consonant “t” appears at the end of many words, including “not” (Line 4), “set” (Line 5), and “inspect” (Line 6). Set/inspect could also be read as a slant rhyme, or near-rhyme, but the end-word consonance expands into an extra line.
Additionally, Dickinson uses consonance within a single line that takes the place of internal rhyme. In the final line, “eat” and “it” (Line 10) echo the previous “t” consonance at the end of Lines 4, 5, and 6.
Related Titles
By Emily Dickinson
