Wild Nights

"Wild nights – Wild nights!" (249)

by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

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 - Tonight -

in Thee!

*Elaine Sexton comments:

Anyone in a long-distance relationship will understand how this oft-quoted love poem might spring to one's lips when unexpectedly snow-bound with the beloved. Thanks to a winter blizzard I was so moored with the added bonus of time to mull over the idea of longing in poetry with the echo of this poem in mind. One of Dickinson's biographers, Cynthia Griffin Wolff, posits that her love poems are either anticipatory or hypothetical, finding evidence in how she constructed her lines in the conditional, "Were I with thee" and "Might I but moor." More recent studies question just how hypothetical the experiences in her love poems were. But Dickinson's unbridled passion, even in the abstract, is ecstatic stuff. What Dickinson stirred up, surprisingly, led me to consider Wallace Stevens' life of the mind, his powers of abstraction, and how he, too, contained the ecstatic experience on the page. He begins the sonnet, "The Well Dressed Man with a Beard," with "After the final no there comes a yes" and ends with an emphatic "It can never be satisfied, the mind, never." Anticipated or actualized, both poets, masters of the mind's field, offer vivid portraits of passion, both corporeal and intellectual, in the reflected as well as the anticipated experience. And isn't that, after all, what a poem is, what's recalled or invented, heightened and considered at a distance.