Success is counted sweetest
by
Emily Dickinson
(Assessment
Questions & Answers)
Text, Summary, Analysis, Points to Remember
Assessment Questions & Answers:
1.
When was the poem, Success is counted
sweetest, written and published?
-
"Success is counted sweetest" is
written in 1859 and published anonymously in 1864.
2.
In which anthology was the poem,
‘Success is counted sweetest’ republished?
-
‘Success is counted sweetest’ was republished
in the anthology ‘A Masque of Poets (1878)’ as part of a series of books
published without writers' names.
3.
What is the major theme of the poem,
‘Success is counted sweetest’?
-
The major theme of the poem, ‘Success is
counted sweetest’ is ‘Success’. It also emphasizes the power of desire and
equates desire with victory.
4.
Who knows the real significance of
success?
-
A failed person knows the true worth of
victory more than a victorious one because he knows the pain of failure.
5.
How one can know the actual value of
something?
-
One can know the actual value of something, if
the ‘want’ for that thing is strong in him.
6.
Who cannot appreciate their victory and
why?
-
Winners, who have never experienced failure,
cannot appreciate their victory, because it seems normal to them and they
cannot understand the sweetness of it anymore. They have got it and after that,
it has lost its meaning for them.
7.
How many poems were published during
Dickinson's lifetime?
-
Only seven poems were published during Dickinson's
lifetime.
8.
What is the background of the poem,
“Success is counted sweetest”?
-
The poem “Success is counted sweetest” is set
in a battlefield where the army on one side has won the battle while the other
side has lost it.
9.
What does “Nectar” and “Purple Host” symbolize
in the poem?
-
In the poem, “Nectar”, symbolizes success and
“Purple Host”, the victorious army.
10.
What is the rhyme scheme in each stanza?
-
The rhyme scheme in each stanza is abcb.
11.
What does the poem, Success is counted sweetest,
express?
-
The poem is an expression of the idea of
compensation, the idea that every evil confers some balancing good, that
through bitterness we are able to appreciate the sweet, that “water is taught
by thirst”. The defeated and dying soldier of this poem is compensated by a
greater awareness of the meaning of victory than the victors themselves can
have: he can comprehend the joy of success through its polar contrast to his
despair.
12.
How, according to Emily, all experiences
are determined?
-
According to Dickinson, all experiences are
relative and determined by their context. Time changes pain; love reflects a
person’s mood; the eye creates beauty. This is a poem, which deals with the
laws of compensation and the inter-relation of pleasure and pain, ecstasy and
despair.
13.
What are the Themes of the poem?
-
The poem has the following major themes:
Failure, a kind of success, Sorest need, Indifference of man, Isolation, and
Death.
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