Grab a seat, folks. Settle down, settle down. Now, take out your notebooks and pens. Are you ready?
Good, because our speaker is about to drop some knowledge on you. This poem really just develops like one big lesson. That lesson, specifically? "Only those who are denied success can truly ever appreciate it." Still, like any good teacher, our speaker isn't just going to give us the answers. She's going to lead us to that conclusion with a series of helpful examples.
Before we get into those, we should point out that we're simply guessing about our speaker being a "she." We just don't get any information about her. Now, it's always dangerous to confuse a poet with her speaker. Even if they talk through first-person point of view, a speaker can still be an invented character. So, we'll just use a "she" for the sake of convenience.
With that out of the way, let's head back to class. Our speaker starts off by stating the end goal of the lesson. She's trying to teach us that "Success is counted sweetest/ By those who ne'er succeed" (1-2). Then, she uses two examples to show us how this is the case. We get a brief one about the nectar, and then a more detailed one about the dying soldier.
What we don't get, however, is any kind of personal detail. How did the speaker-teacher come to this realization about life? How might she feel about this ultimately sad fact about human existence? It's not about her, though, which again puts us in mind of a good teacher.
You know that teacher you had once that just loved to go on and on about his or her personal experiences? Do you remember those long, pointless stories that never connected to the class material at all? If you do, you're probably better at remembering how annoyed you were than you are at remembering any of the lessons. In this poem, though, the speaker is not going in for any of those pointless personal stories.
Nope—she's focused on our takeaways. And, while that lesson is a pretty harsh one to have to learn, we'd say that it's one she delivers effectively. Just read the rest of our poetry guide here, and we're sure you'll get an A in her class.