Delight Is as the Flight
poem 257
Delight Is as the Flight - meaning Summary
Delight Compared to Flight
The poem likens delight to flight and to a rainbow: vivid, rapid, and essentially transient. Dickinson recalls a childlike acceptance of rainbows and empty skies, then shifts to the adult awareness that such brightness does not last. That awareness applies to lives and butterflies—beautiful, briefly visible, and capable of deceiving the eye. The closing image suggests occasional, surprising compensation: some mornings grant distant rewards or expanded possibility. Overall, the poem meditates on pleasure’s ephemerality and the mixture of joy and apprehension that accompanies fleeting beauty.
Read Complete AnalysesDelight is as the flight Or in the Ratio of it, As the Schools would say The Rainbow’s way A Skein Flung colored, after Rain, Would suit as bright, Except that flight Were Aliment If it would last I asked the East, When that Bent Stripe Struck up my childish Firmament And I, for glee, Took Rainbows, as the common way, And empty Skies The Eccentricity And so with Lives And so with Butterflies Seen magic through the fright That they will cheat the sight And Dower latitudes far on Some sudden morn Our portion in the fashion Done
Feel free to be first to leave comment.