The Transubstantiation of Nature

(I'm so glad I've been studying the Bible and religion this year!)

Emily Dickinson’s poem “I taste a liquor never brewed” articulates the poet’s experience of inebriation, not from alcohol but from the natural world. With her abundant use of dashes, she recreates the experience of drunken stumbling as well as the slurred speech of a drunkard. Nevertheless, I would argue that her metaphorical drunkenness here is not as much a comment on the joy of enjoying nature as it is an expression of the poet’s connection with the spiritual.

The foxgloves that we might normally see as flowers in a field are recreated by Emily Dickenson almost like the name of pub for bees. When the bee gets too drunk, the proprietors (or “landlords”) of the Foxgloves inn kick him out. The butterfly, on the other hand, realizes his drunkenness himself (as do so many people who have realized they had become too inebriated) and swears off drink forever. The poet, however, has no plans to sober up. Instead, she bellies up to a bar serving the metaphorical liquid of the molten blue sky. Instead of the “fine Rhine wine” alluded to in the first stanza, and instead of the nectar of the insects described in the second, the poet becomes drunk on air and dew--that is, on nature. She will imbibe summer’s exuberance until the snow falls from angels’ hats.

With her use of the reference to the Rhine, the poet suggests that her inebriant is a replacement not just for alcohol but specifically for wine. Writing in an era when Christianity was central to the experience of community, Emily Dickinson would have been keenly aware of the religious resonance of images of wine as the transubstantiated blood of Christ. She chooses to end the poem “leaning against the--Sun--” suggesting perhaps that she was leaning against the core of her religious faith, or Jesus. The Sun, set off by the poet with dashes perhaps to indicate its deep significance, becomes the Son.

Although she appears to be alluding to Christianity in this poem, Dickinson utterly rejects the more formulaic religious practices of her time. While the saints inside their churches look out the windows at her (perhaps in surprise or shock), the poet experiences religion directly and personally outdoors in nature, unencumbered by the formal beliefs, rituals, and hierarchy of the church. Here she seems to support the almost Whitmanian trust in nature, freedom, and direct experience.

Rather than the eucharist's communion wine turning into the blood of Christ, nature here transubstantiates into the spiritual. The poet drinks deeply, filled with a uniquely modern kind of religious experience. The lack of a final period perhaps suggest the openness and inclusivity of her kind of faith as well as, perhaps, the eternal nature of Christ.