Emily Dickinson

I taste a liquor never brewed --
From Tankards scooped in Pearl --
Not all the Vats upon the Rhine
Yield such an Alcohol!

Inebriate of Air -- am I --
And Debauchee of Dew --
Reeling -- thro 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 little Tippler
Leaning against the -- Sun –

The speaker in this poem describes herself as a drunkard of nature, particularly of summer. She says that images of summer saturate her: the air, the dew, the blue perhaps of sky and water and the very air, the sun, the flowers, and butterflies. But she is not merely filled with a moderate enjoyment of them; she is madly, crazily in love with summer, so much so that she describes herself as one who is morally loose, “reeling” in a drunken state. The bee and the butterfly, which are by nature saturated with the honey or pollen from the flowers, become her competitors. She usurps their natural state by becoming a debauchee making love to the flowers and drinking from them. The seraphs and the saints are holy figures that are the voyeurs seeing her in a transported state. 

Dickinson invokes the idea of religious ecstasy in the final stanza.  Nature makes her experience ecstasy that even the holy figures can barely fathom; they can only look on without participating in her experience.  She may be a “little” Tippler, but her ecstasy is so big that it seems like she is leaning against the Sun itself—the largest star in the solar system!

The dashes in the poem give us the feeling of the speaker in a drunken state, not being able to keep a steady gait.  The form mirrors the content.

Dickinson is using imagery that is unconventional. While being drunk on summer is conventional, being drunk as a woman is far from proper behavior expected in a genteel woman. Worse still is the description of herself as a debauchee or a morally loose woman. The sexual imagery (like that of Georgia o’Keefe painting sexually-themed flowers) of a woman in a quasi sexual and religious ecstasy, as if they are the same, is itself blasphemous. Her particular alcohol is indeed fed to her from nature’s bottle made of the precious pearl from oysters.