Impossibility, Like Wine

Impossibility, Like Wine - meaning Summary

Risk Feels Intoxicating

The poem contrasts the thrill of the impossible with the blandness of the merely possible. Using a wine metaphor, Dickinson suggests that impossibility intoxicates and excites, while possibility lacks taste. Even a faint trace of chance adds allure, and in that small dram the magical and the catastrophic coexist. The poem captures how imagination and risk confer intensity on experience that straightforward likelihood cannot provide.