A Summary and Analysis of ‘Wild Nights! Wild Nights!’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Wild nights – Wild nights!’ The energy and exultation with which Emily Dickinson opens this, one of her most passionately felt poems, encourages us to share the excitement and passion, or at least dares us to try to resist it.

Although this is not perhaps the opening line of Emily Dickinson’s that most readily springs to readers’ minds, the poem as a whole is worthy of close analysis.

Summary

Wild nights – Wild nights!
Were I with thee
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!

It’s always dangerous to attempt to paraphrase a poem, especially the distinctive style of an Emily Dickinson poem. But really, that opening stanza strikes us for its modern sound: it’s almost a chat-up line, albeit more elegantly put than most: ‘I tell you, if I was with you tonight, we’d have the wildest time, believe me. Know what I mean? Wink wink.’

Note, however, the shift from the first into the second line: ‘Wild nights!’ is not the description of some actual experienced passion, but rather an exclamatory longing, a yearning for something that the speaker wishes were true but isn’t: ‘Were I with thee’, the next line proclaims, switching to the subjunctive mood where things are wished for rather than real.

And the sexual playfulness within the stanza does seem to be deliberate. The triple repetition of the phrase ‘Wild nights’ – twice in the opening line, and then again at the beginning of the third line – reinforces the idea of wild passion which the speaker envisions between herself and the addressee of the poem.

Futile – the winds –
To a Heart in port –
Done with the Compass –
Done with the Chart!

That middle stanza, however, complicates this initial analysis: these ‘wild nights’ would be the lovers’ ‘luxury’ because they would be together, a calm amidst the storm, and the winds would blow in vain, trying to blow them off course.

But their hearts would be ‘in port’ and have no need for their compass or chart, since they would have sailed their boats to each other and have no need to travel further.

There is anaphora – the repetition of a word at the beginning of successive lines – in lines 7-8 of the poem, where ‘Done’ is repeated to reinforce the safety and sense of being ‘home’ that someone feels when they are in love and with the person they long for.

Rowing in Eden –
Ah – the Sea!
Might I but moor – tonight –
In thee!

The final stanza then implies that rowing one’s boat across the sea would be paradise – ‘Eden’ – if the speaker got to spend but one night – tonight – with her beloved.

The image of ‘mooring’ within her beloved – an image that risks sexual suggestiveness and, in doing so, reversing the usual gender roles with the female speaker being the one to ‘enter’ the harbour of her loved one – is an equally passionate one with which to conclude this poem of passion.

Here, we might compare Dickinson’s poem with Robert Browning’s sensually suggestive ‘Meeting at Night’:

And the startled little waves that leap
In fiery ringlets from their sleep,
As I gain the cove with pushing prow,
And quench its speed i’ the slushy sand.

Here, that phallic ‘pushing prow’ summons the more intimate ‘meeting’ between the male speaker and the (presumably female) addressee (with the heat being turned up on the next stanza with its talk of the ‘blue spurt’ of a lit match).

But in Dickinson, she longs to be ‘moored’ in her beloved: she is the boat (or prow) and the (male, or even female?) addressee is the harbour or ‘port’. And those ‘winds’ mentioned in Dickinson’s second stanza imply that the speaker has suffered tempestuous emotions, the pangs of unrequited or unsatisfied love, and now longs to calm her heart through giving it what it desires.

Analysis

‘Wild nights – Wild nights!’ shows what a very passionate poet Dickinson can be, and that it isn’t all death and morbid thoughts in her finest work. She is also a great poet of yearning and desire.

Not for the first time when reading an Emily Dickinson poem, we are put in mind of a million song lyrics written since: Dickinson appears to have anticipated, or perhaps even influenced, the longing of the three-minute love song in which the singer yearns to be with his or her loved one for just one night of passion and love.

Both the language of Dickinson’s short poem, and the form she casts it in (of which more below), perfectly capture the sense of exultation and excitement at the mere thought of being with someone for whom one feels a passionate desire. The ecstasy one would feel if one spent the night with them more than justifies the exclamation marks in Dickinson’s opening line as well as in lines 4, 8, 10, and 12.

The repetitions also suggest the single-minded fixation the speaker has on the object of her desire: ‘Wild nights – Wild nights!’ in that opening stanza, of course, but also again in the third line; that anaphora of ‘Done with the’ in lines 7-8; that repetition of ‘thee’, the object of the speaker’s longing, as the rhyming word in both the second line and the final line of the poem.

Form

As Helen Vendler notes in her book-length study of Dickinson, the poem’s quatrain structure – Dickinson’s preferred arrangement – actually conceals the fact that this is a poem written in rhyming quatrains: for example, the first stanza could be reorganised as follows:

Wild nights – Wild nights! Were I with thee
Wild nights should be Our luxury!

The shorter lines, written in dimeter (that is, two feet per line), reflect the breathless and heady desire, the quickening of the heartbeat and the impatience to be passionate with someone, which the poem yearningly describes.