Emily Dickinson

Wild Nights! Wild Nights!

Were I with thee,

Wild Nights should be

Our luxury!

Futile the winds

To a heart in port, --

Done with the compass,

Done with the chart!

Rowing in Eden!

Ah! the sea!

Might I but moor

To-night in Thee!

I am going to talk about the poem “Wild Nights, Wild Nights” by Emily Dickinson. Actually I did not get the real idea in the class. But after I read several times and combined it with her thought, life, and experience, the inner connotation became clearly.

We all know that Dickinson neither got married nor had any children during her whole life, even she stayed in her parents’ house for most of the time. However, she would not be a lonely poet without any passion. Therefore, the “Wild Nights” here can be interpreted as “passion”, “love” or the “desire of the sexual life”. “Our luxury” in the first stanza seems to refer to the emotion between the two lovers. Although this poem contains no narrative plot, it still showed Dickinson’s strong yearning for reunion with a lover.

Love was one of the most important themes of Dickinson’s work. Another theme of her poems was death. She wrote about 1700 poems during her whole life, and one thirds of them are related to the death. Her view of death was quite different and with more deeply implications compared to others. She believed that the death was the beginning of life, and life was endless to her. Also, it was this thought that reflected her as a Transcendentalist.