Eat, Drink, And Be Merry

A neighbor brought some homemade cookies over today, so I made some coffee to have with them. 

The coffee reminded me that this February -- or FeBREWary as we like to call it at the Emmett Lee Dickinson Museum -- we will post more of Emmett Lee Dickinson's poetry about coffee -- HERE.   This will be the 9th year in a row that we have posted "28 Days of Coffee Poems." 

Of course, that made me wonder how often third cousin Emily wrote about coffee -- or tea -- or any other beverage.  So I checked out the online Emily Dickinson Archive (HERE) to see how often Dickinson's poems used words of food and drink.

The results are below.

​When it comes to words related to eating and drinking, here's what I found (the number following the each term is how many different poems in which the word appears):

Thirst:  11
Drink:  12
Drank:  3
Drunk:  1*
Eat:  6
Ate:  ???**
Eaten: 0
Food:  9
Meal:  2
Breakfast:  7
Dinner:  3
Supper:  2
Feed:  8
​Fed 3
Banquet:  6

* "Drunk" was used in three poems by Dickinson; however, she used it as the past participle of "drink" only once.

** Alas, I could not check the archive for "ate" because it seemed to malfunction.  Instead of pulling up entries for the word "ate," it gave me every instance where the letters "ate" appeared -- as in gATE, dATE, fascinATE, etc.  There were close to 900 entries -- so I did not check them all for the word "ate."

Although I did not check for all the various types of food that Dickinson wrote about, I did check for "bread" -- it appears in 7 poems -- and "loaf" -- it appears in 3 poems. 

Now back to the coffee, the original word that prompted this post.  I checked to see how often Dickinson wrote about coffee, tea, and other drinks -- and here is what I found:

Coffee:  1
Tea:  4
Milk: 1
Cream:  0
Brew:  3
Liquor:  6
​Sherry:  0
Wine:  17
Water:  32

While Dickinson did have numerous references to "wine" and "liquor," I did not find any mention of "margaritas" in her poetry.  However, that is not the case with her third cousin, Emmett Lee -- but I'll save that information for a later date.

Oh -- and by the way --  since I happened to be checking the online archive for "eat" (6 poems) and "drink" (12 poems), I thought I might as well check for "merry" (10 poems).

So eat, drink, and be merry this holiday season.  Read some poetry.  And join us in FeBREWary 2021 when we post 28 more poems about coffee by Emmett Le Dickinson. 

For more statistics related to the poetry of Emily Dickinson, click HERE.