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!~Emily Dickinson
Rowing in Eden –
Ah – the Sea!
Might I but moor – tonight –
In thee!
I love this one. It’s breathless and brim-full of emotion, and unlike many of the poems we’ve discussed this month, this is actually, irrefutably, undeniably a love poem! She can do it! She can write love poems that are about love!
This is a gorgeous jewel of a poem, and I don’t want to belabor it with a long meditation. I just want to point out what I think is the genius of this poem–it manages to capture both the headiness and the deep, calm comfort of love.
Sentence fragments, syntax, exclamation marks, and Dickinson’s ubiquitous dashes all contribute to the breathless feel. This love is exciting, passionate. The speaker opens with the image of “wild nights,” which sets the tone for the entire poem.
But the love she’s talking about is also profoundly comfortable. A “heart in port” is one at rest. To be “done with the compass” and “done with the chart” further underscores that notion. This speaker is no longer searching. She has found exactly what she wants.
By the end of the poem, the tempest seems to have passed. You can’t row very effectively in the middle of a storm–the waters are calm now. And Eden isn’t likely to be a storm-tossed place. It’s a place where the speaker can moor, drop anchor, rest. The implication is that she’s here to stay.
Of course, this is a Dickinson love poem, so this is all imagined: the “might” is important. She hasn’t achieved this ideal state, she’s only imagining it. Still, she doesn’t throw in anything else to disrupt the envisioned tranquility. Nobody dies! This alone makes “Wild Nights” a strong contender for “Best Dickinson Love Poem that Is Actually a Love Poem.”
The Emily Project 