Search results
Emily Dickinson is one of America’s greatest and most original poets of all time. She took definition as her province and challenged the existing definitions of poetry and the poet’s work. Like writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, she experimented with expression in...
Emily Dickinson's "Fame is a fickle food" presents celebrity as something volatile and unpredictable. Getting a taste of this metaphorical food one day is no guarantee that you'll get it the next.
Fame is a fickle food Upon a shifting plate Whose table once a Guest but not The second time is set. Whose crumbs the crows inspect And with ironic caw Flap past it to the Farmer's Corn – Men eat of it and die.
“Fame is a fickle food” is one of Dickinson’s many loose-leaf and undated, but signed, poems. Scholars believe it was written late in Dickinson’s life because she only began signing poems that she did not include in letters late in life. It is a short, free-verse elegiac (elegy-like) poem.
Fame is a fickle food / Upon a shifting plate / Whose table once a / Guest but not / The second time is set / Whose crumbs the crows inspect / And with ironic caw / Flap past it to.
Dickinson begins with the metaphor, or comparison, between fame and food, which is the controlling image of the poem. The adjective “fickle” (Line 1) indicates that the food of fame is not always accessible or consistent.
Fame is a fickle food Upon a shifting plate Whose table once a Guest but not The second time is set. Whose crumbs the crows inspect And with ironic caw Flap past it to the Farmer's Corn — Men eat of it and die.
