The poem I selected was “Success is counted sweetest” by Emily Dickinson, and just like her other poems, there seemed like there is something we need to solve in her poem. However, after reading it a couple times, I realized that this poem doesn’t have a mystery object, but a mystery  theme. Looking at the title, I noticed that the first line was the same as the title, but that is not uncommon for Emily Dickinson poems. I started with the TP- CASTT method of analyzing a poem, and looking at the title, it seemed that the poem was going to be about how success and when it feels the best. The title is unusual in the fact that the author writes that the success is “counted sweetest” because normally, it wouldn’t be written that way, it would either be written longer in order to explain when success is sweetest, or they would just say “success is the sweetest when…”. My interpretation of that was, they made the title that way to make it seem more poetic and make it fit with the size of the rest of the lines in the poem. Next, I paraphrased the poem, and looked at the connotation of the poem. The first stanza seems to be saying that success is the best thing for people who don’t succeed and to realize success the most, one must not have it. The second stanza was a little hard to interpret because there was a line about a “purple Host” and taking a flag. However, when looking up what a purple Host may be, I found out that it could mean a royal or noble army. A royal army is one that finds success at every corner which then makes the stanza make sense. The stanza is basically saying that not everyone who won “the Flag” can tell the meaning of that victory because they have succeeded often. This stanza is repeating something, potentially a theme, in the second stanza, but it is told in the opposite way. Instead of saying that the ones who don’t succeed find success easiest to define, the speaker says that one who succeeds easier cannot define success. The third and final stanza was the most confusing. The way I interpreted it is that a fallen soldier who lost can tell the sound of victory and success as lay dying, because he is the furthest away from success. After paraphrasing the poem, there seems to be a theme revolving around success and those who haven’t succeeded. Looking at the connotation, I noticed that there was an ABCB rhyming scheme, even though in the second stanza, there rhymes “today” with “victory”, which is another trend of Emily Dickinson. I also noticed that there were a couple of capitalized words which were not at the start of a line. “Host” and “Flag” were capitalized, and I don’t really know why they are capitalized. Dickinson also doesn’t use commas, but instead uses line breaks as a short pause. The word “never” is shortened into “ne’er”, which I believe is to make that line have one less syllable. Dickinson also isolates the word dying with two dashes. Dashes is another favorite of Dickinson, but since it is isolated, it must have some deeper meaning to it. I think the meaning of dying is that the person is the furthest from success, and so they would understand the meaning of success the most. Next, I came up with two tone words. The first tone word was informative for the first half due to the words that were defining the success. The second half of the poem had a grim or enlightening tone due to the dying man realizing the meaning of success. This leads me to find the shift in the poem. I found the shift to be in between the second and third stanza due to the shift in tone and sentence structure. Looking back at the title, I see that this poem is talking about the definition of success, and how it changes based on the situation of the person. This leads me to the theme of the poem. While Emily Dickinson normally has a mystery word associated with the poem, this poem has a theme behind it. The theme that I came up with was that only those in the worst situations know what the meaning of the best situation is. These people have the best definition of success, because they never had it. This is true in the real world, because there is a saying that it is easy to get to the top, but it is hard to stay at the top. In a game of King of the Hill, the people closer to the bottom have more motivation to succeed, while the person at the top would have lesser meaning because they already have succeeded. I believe that this poem is a lesson rather than a mystery, as Emily Dickinson wants people to learn and define the meaning of success.

My annotations and logic notation: