Undue Significance a starving man attaches

Undue Significance a starving man attaches
To Food —
Far off — He sighs — and therefore — Hopeless —
And therefore — Good —

Partaken — it relieves — indeed —
But proves us
That Spices fly
In the Receipt — It was the Distance —
Was Savory —
                             F626 (1863)  J439


 I have to admire Emily Dickinson who is an imagist and metaphorist of the very first rank, who knows how to start off a poem with a killer lead, but who can also begin the first stanza of a poem with 'Undue Significance' and the other stanza with 'Partaken'. Her father and brother were both lawyers and I imagine she acquired both an ear for legalese and a sound sense of formal logic. The phrases signal the rather dry, abstract tone of this poem about hunger and desire.
        Dickinson emphasizes the legal diction by reversing the grammatical order of the first line. It wouldn't sound too interesting as "A starving man attaches Undue Significance / To Food".  The "Undue" is trochaic, making the line even more weighty. Dickinson proceeds to include two 'therefore's, a 'proves' and a 'Receipt'.  It is an attempt at drollery, I believe, making the case that anticipation beats fulfillment.
        She wrote two similar poems within a year or two of this one, using quite different diction: In "Heaven'—is what I cannot reach!" (F310), Dickinson develops a series of vivid metaphors to illustrate how heaven is always unattainable. It is an apple hopelessly out of reach, a forbidden property, etc. Robert Browning wrote, and Dickinson might very well have read, "Ah, but a man's reach must extend his grasp, / Or what's a heaven for" ("Andrea del Sarto", publ. 1855). Browning, though, is getting at reaching for an unattainable level of artistic excellence. Dickinson, on the other hand, yearns for the ineffable.
        In 'I had been hungry, all the Years –' (F439), she uses, as she does in the present poem, the analogy of hunger for desire, but she does so with concrete details: crumbs and bread, tables with 'Curious Wine', berries and bushes, roads and windows. She concludes that poem with the aphorism that "Hunger – was a way / Of Persons outside Windows – / The Entering – takes away." Hunger here represents a yearning for completion, for the satisfaction of a gnawing desire; yet the object of that yearning and desire is misplaced. Having access to the Table and the 'Curious Wine', having touched and tasted the feast, having had the 'Plenty', the speaker finds herself feeling 'ill – and odd'; she ultimately realizes that it is not the food that takes away the hunger but the access to food. Once seen clearly, the feast loses its appeal. It does not satisfy.

Emilio Longoni, "Reflections of a Starving Man", 1894

Dickinson is clearly no gourmand. In this poem she portrays herself as no simple gourmet, either. She prefers the longing for the food in all its spicy savour to the tasting. Indeed, having tasted, she loses interest in the foods' flavor altogether. That opening "Undue Significance" is almost like a wagging finger. Satisfying your hunger is a bodily satisfaction and need. But the body is a simple thing, she reminds us, compared to imagination. That's where the real spice is. That's where the real satisfaction can be found.

I don't find that a particularly remarkable insight. Further, I find much of the poem plodding and bare. A starving man is introduced, but he is not a real entity but rather staked out in some culinary desert as an example. The only action word is "fly" and that is what spices theoretically do once we stick a fork in the longed-for food.