Fame Is a Fickle Food (1702)

“Fame is a fickle food” is written in unpunctuated free verse. It is 10 lines long. Dickinson’s lines are between six and three syllables long: Lines 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, and 10 have six syllables, Lines 3 and 8 have five syllables, and Lines 4 and 9 have three syllables. This reveals a pattern of two lines with six syllables, one line with five syllables, and one line with three syllables, followed by three lines with six syllables, one line with five syllables, and one line with three syllables, ending with a 10-syllable line. However, the variations in this pattern—the growing number of six-syllable lines before the subsequent lines shrink to five and three syllables—defies most metrical forms. The final line, Line 10, scans as iambic (has a pattern of each unstressed syllable being followed by a stressed syllable); however, her other lines resist any sort of regularity in metrical scansion.

Dickinson also resists formal language, instead utilizing plain style. While there is a slant rhyme, or near-rhyme, in Lines 5 and 6 (set/inspect), other poems by Dickinson more clearly exhibit her particular use of slant rhyme. “Fame is a fickle food” has elements from the elegy form.