Fame Is a Fickle Food (1659), by Emily Dickinson

Fame Is a Fickle Food (1659)

Fame is a fickle food

Upon a shifting plate

Whose table once a

Guest but not

The second time is set.

Whose crumbs the crows inspect

And with ironic caw

Flap past it to the Farmer’s Corn—

Men eat of it and die.

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895 A Cloud withdrew from the Sky Superior Glory be But that Cloud and its Auxiliarie… Are forever lost to me

998 Best Things dwell out of Sight The Pearl—the Just—Our Thought. Most shun the Public Air Legitimate, and Rare—

Judgment is justest When the Judged, His action laid away, Divested is of every Disk But his sincerity.

771 None can experience sting Who Bounty—have not known— The fact of Famine—could not be Except for Fact of Corn—

Revolution is the Pod Systems rattle from When the Winds of Will are stirre… Excellent is Bloom But except its Russet Base

Ended, ere it begun - The Title was scarcely told When the Preface perished from Co… The Story, unrevealed - Had it been mine, to print!

Ample make this bed. Make this bed with awe; In it wait till judgment break Excellent and fair. Be its mattress straight,

LVII EXCEPT the heaven had come so n… So seemed to choose my door, The distance would not haunt me so… I had not hoped before.

No brigadier throughout the year So civic as the jay. A neighbor and a warrior too, With shrill felicity Pursuing winds that censure us

Nature the gentlest mother is, Impatient of no child, The feeblest of the waywardest. Her admonition mild In forest and the hill

793 Grief is a Mouse— And chooses Wainscot in the Breas… For His Shy House— And baffles quest—

I found the phrase to every though… I ever had, but one; And that defies me,—as a hand Did try to chalk the sun To races nurtured in the dark;—

A Sickness of this World it most… When Best Men die. A Wishfulness their far Condition To occupy. A Chief indifference, as Foreign

752 So the Eyes accost—and sunder In an Audience— Stamped—occasionally—forever— So may Countenance

The Soul unto itself Is an imperial friend— Or the most agonizing Spy— An Enemy—could send— Secure against its own—