Calendar Books by Allen James - Daily Reading - "The Journey: A Calendar Book"

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Today's reading from Allen James' The Journey: A Calendar Book is a quote by poet, Emily Dickinson:

"Success is counted sweetest by those who never succeed" (James, 2012).

In Dickinson's poem, Success is Counted Sweetest, the speaker says, “those who ne’er succeed” place the highest value on success. (They “count” it “sweetest”.) To understand the value of a nectar, the speaker says, one must feel “sorest need.” She says the members of the victorious army (“the purple Host / Who took the flag today”) are not able to define victory as well as the defeated, dying man who hears from a distance the music of the victors.

Many of Emily Dickinson’s most famous lyrics take the form of homilies, or short moral sayings, which appear quite simple but actually describe complicated moral and psychological truths. “Success is counted sweetest” is such a poem; its first two lines express its homiletic point, “Success is counted sweetest / By those who ne’er succeed” (or, more generally, people tend to desire things more acutely when they do not have them). The subsequent lines then develop axiomatic truth by offering a pair of images which exemplify it: the nectar—a symbol of triumph, luxury, “success”—can best be comprehended by someone who “needs” it; the defeated, dying man understands victory more clearly than the victorious army does. The poem exhibits Dickinson’s keen awareness of the complicated truths of human desire (in a later poem on a similar theme, she wrote that “Hunger—was a way / Of Persons outside Windows— / The Entering—takes away—”), and it shows the beginnings of her terse, compacted style, whereby complicated meanings are compressed into extremely short phrases (e.g., “On whose forbidden ear”).

Don't want what you don't have.  Seek personal success in life.  Keep looking up.  :  )  AJ


(Sparks)