Success is counted sweetest
First published in A Masque of Poets (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1878); The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1924).
Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne’er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.
Not one of all the purple host
Who took the flag to-day
Can tell the definition,
So clear, of victory,
As he, defeated, dying,
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Break, agonized and clear.