Dickinson parades three predators before she tells us what they are for. A starved whirlpool swallows navies. A teased vulture raids the broods in "lonely Valleys." A tiger, given only "a Crumb of Blood," "fasts Scarlet" until he finds a man. The whole poem is one stretched comparison, "As… As… As…", and the subject arrives only in the last stanza: "I, of a finer Famine / Deem my Supper dry." The speaker claims that her hunger outdoes all of these.
The tiger carries the central idea. The crumb "eased" him, but the word is ironic, because the taste does not satisfy him, it sharpens him. After the man has cooled his tongue "for a moment," he "Grows a fiercer thing," and his usual dates and cocoa now seem "A Nutrition mean." Appetite feeds on itself: once you have tasted the real thing, ordinary fare becomes unbearable. The speaker applies the same logic to herself. The last two lines can be read as saying that her supper is dry because of nothing more than "a Berry of Domingo / And a Torrid Eye." The poem never says what these stand for. Reading them as a longing for something intense, perhaps love or a heightened kind of experience, is an inference from the heat and hunger imagery, not something the text states.
The most striking choice is the diction. Dickinson describes a killing in the language of a dinner party. The man is "Dainty adorned with Veins and Tissues," like a dish garnished for the table, and the tiger "partakes" of a "Morsel" and "esteem[s]" his dates inferior, like a fussy connoisseur. The politeness makes the violence colder and funnier at once. It also sets up the final turn, because the speaker uses nearly the same verb of judgment: the tiger "esteem[s]" his food mean, and she "deem[s]" her supper dry. She is passing the tiger's verdict on her own plate, so the comparison is not a loose decoration. It is built into the grammar.
The form works in a similar way. Lines alternate between long and short, so that "As the Starved Maelstrom laps the Navies" is followed by the clipped "As the Vulture teased," and the rhythm lurches like snapped bites. Rhyme is sparse. The only full rhymes are "teased/eased" in the first stanza and "dry/Eye" in the last, which brackets the poem, and the stretch between them is deliberately loose. The syntax also pulls against the stanzas. The second stanza ends on "his Tongue," and the sentence stays suspended across the gap before "Cooled by the Morsel" arrives. The dash after "partakes" adds another small pause, as if the poem is holding its breath at the moment of tasting. The odd phrases are compressed in the same way. "Fasts Scarlet" fuses emptiness and colour, a hunger already stained red by the blood that failed to fill it.
The imagery also shrinks in scale. We begin with an ocean engulfing fleets and end with a single berry and a single eye. This sets up the poem's paradox, that the smallest stimulus provokes the largest hunger. The hot, exotic words "Tiger," "Dates," "Cocoa," "Domingo" and "Torrid" suggest a climate where everything burns. Even the supper is more than a plain meal, since it is "dry" because the speaker has glimpsed something juicier. "Finer" can mean more refined, but it also suggests thinner and sharper, a hunger with a keener edge than the tiger's.
Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) wrote in Amherst, Massachusetts, and most of her poems went unpublished in her lifetime. Her compression, odd capitals and daring syntax are all on show here. The poem is significant because it takes an unsettling idea about desire and makes it in a surprisingly bold voice. The speaker does not play the humble, pining lover. She says she is hungrier than a man-eating tiger and then ends with the quiet, dangerous word "Eye."