18 pages • 36 minutes read
Emily DickinsonFame Is a Fickle Food (1702)
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1914A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Corn
In Dickinson’s poetry, corn is a symbol often associated with death, harvest, and autumn. In her poem “There is a June when Corn is cut,” early corn harvest marks a too-brief summer. This is accompanied by the appearance of a “Grave” (Line 5) that appears in a similar position to “Corn” (Line 1); both are the second capitalized noun in the first line of their respective stanzas.
The macabre harvesting of corn in “There is a June when Corn is cut” recalls the corn that is owned by the farmer in “Fame is a fickle food.” The possessive “Farmer’s corn” implies that the corn is still on the stalk, where the crows can easily access it. Reading the “it” of Line 10’s “Men eat of it and die” as corn—the closest potential referent noun in Line 9—in addition to fame (the noun that was previously given the pronoun “it”) furthers the association between corn and death.
Also, for Dickinson—who never left Amherst—corn played an important symbolic role in her conception of the American pastoral. Midwestern states, rather than Dickinson’s home state of Massachusetts, contain the corn harvesters of America. The traditional British pastoral also does not include corn. Dickinson contributes to the creation of a pastoral tradition in America, one that is, in her case, specifically imagined from inside her New England home rather than experienced out in the fields of Iowa, Ohio, or Kansas.
Crows
Crows are a common symbol of death, and they are the creatures who survive in “Fame is a fickle food.” This irony is echoed in their “ironic caw” (Line 7). Eating corn, another symbol of death, sustains the crows in a way that fame will not sustain “men” (Line 10). While “men” (Line 10) are supposed to be the more intelligent creatures, it is the crows that “inspect” (Line 6) their food carefully. The crows’ inspection causes them to “flap past” (Line 8) the food of fame. Meanwhile, “men” (Line 10) eat indiscriminately of the food of fame, which causes them to die.
The motif of birds refusing human food is echoed in Dickinson’s poem “A Bird came down the Walk.” The speaker in this poem offers the bird on her walk “a Crumb” (Line 14), but the bird is “Like one in danger, Cautious” (Line 13) and flies away. The action of the bird on the “Walk” (Line 1) is similar to the way the crow in “Fame is a fickle food” inspects “crumbs” (Line 6) and flies away. According to Michael Ferber’s A Dictionary of Literary Symbols, “The raven (and the crow) prosper when men slaughter one another, and so they are associated [...] generally with imminent death” (168). In Dickinson’s poem, fame would be the way men slaughter one another, and so it attracts, but does not kill, crows.
Related Titles
By Emily Dickinson
