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The Full Text of “Wild nights - Wild nights!”
1Wild nights - Wild nights!
2Were I with thee
3Wild nights should be
4Our luxury!
5Futile - the winds -
6To a Heart in port -
7Done with the Compass -
8Done with the Chart!
9Rowing in Eden -
10Ah - the Sea!
11Might I but moor - tonight -
12In thee!
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“Wild nights - Wild nights!” Introduction
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"Wild nights - Wild nights!" is a poem by Emily Dickinson, one of the most famous and original of American writers. In this brief but powerful poem, the speaker longs to share "wild nights" with an absent lover. She imagines herself as a sailor on a stormy sea, searching for the harbor of her love. The lover in the poem might reference the speaker's desire to be closer to God, or simply the desire to be intimate with another person. On that note, when the poem was first published in an 1891 collection of Dickinson's work, the publisher worried that the poem's eroticism might shock the general public!
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“Wild nights - Wild nights!” Summary
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The speaker begins by exclaiming about wild nights—an image that might equally suggest literal stormy nights and nights of passion. If only she were with an unknown addressee, she says, nights like this would bring them immense (and shared) pleasure.
Wild winds, the speaker goes on, can have no effect on a heart that is safely lodged in port—an image which suggests that the speaker imagines herself as a sailor or a boat, and her beloved as a safe harbor. When the speaker's heart is in such a port, it has no more need of the tools of navigation: it's found the place it can rest.
The speaker then turns to a very different image of her imagined ocean: no longer a dangerous, tempestuous place, but Paradise itself. She exclaims over this imagined sea, with an "Ah!" that could express pleasure, pain, or both. The poem returns at its end to the image of the beloved as a harbor, which the speaker wishes she could enter this very night.
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“Wild nights - Wild nights!” Themes
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Sexual Passion
Dickinson’s compact poem is a small explosion of desire. The speaker imagines herself as both a sailor and a boat on a stormy sea, wishing desperately to be resting in the “port” of her love (an image with a strong sexual innuendo built into it). The poem ultimately presents passionate love as something paradoxical: it’s both wild and comforting, dangerous and secure.
The speaker begins by exclaiming “Wild nights - Wild nights!” as if looking out into a storm. She then imagines how her experience of such nights would be transformed into “luxury” if her beloved were with her. Aside from the literal storm the speaker is looking out into and wishing she could share with her beloved, those “wild nights” and their “luxury” (a word that had sexual connotations in Dickinson’s time) suggest a passionate sexuality. In other words, the speaker is implying that, if only her beloved were around, they’d have a great time.
The speaker goes on to build a contrasting image of the satisfied, passionate heart as a boat in port, beyond the reach of storms. The speaker’s image of herself as a boat resting in a harbor creates a sense of simultaneous calm and wildness. While “the winds” would still be blowing if she were safely harbored with her love, those winds would be “futile,” unable to affect her in the way they do now. The security of satisfied love would create a place of safety and rest within her wild desire.
The image of the speaker as a boat at sea suggests her own smallness and helplessness in proportion to the ocean of her desire, but also her determination: the “compass” and “chart” give a sense of her drive to seek a known place, and then to be done with that searching. In representing her beloved as the port, she creates a feeling that the beloved is her home, a place of undisturbed security. Being with her love, again, offers both a sense of wildness and tranquility.
In the final stanza, the speaker’s use of religious imagery completes her picture of passion as a thing that is simultaneously stormy and calm. From the wild nights of the previous stanzas, the speaker transitions into a quite different image: “rowing in Eden.” Eden, the earthly paradise from the Bible, is an image of perfection—and of shameless sexuality. (Readers may remember that before Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit and are driven from Eden, they are naked and unashamed.) To be “rowing in Eden,” then, is to be on a calmer and more blissful sea than the one the speaker has previously shown.
The exclamation “Ah! - the sea!”, in both its energy and its ambiguity, then brings together all the visions of passion readers have seen so far. That “Ah!” could be a cry of relief, of fear, of pleasure, or of pain—and all of these possibilities are present at once. Finally, the poem closes on a passionate punch: if you’re thinking that the “in” of “in thee” is a pretty vivid sexual image, you are not wrong. The speaker is utterly caught up in her imagining of the sexual consummation she wishes for with her beloved.
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Longing and Absence
“Wild nights - Wild nights!” can be read, on the one hand, as a poem about the simultaneous wildness and comfort of sexual intimacy. But the speaker’s beloved never actually appears in the poem; the whole thing is simply the speaker imagining how great things would be if the beloved were there. This doesn’t make the poem any less passionate or exciting, however, and in this way, the poem suggests that there is a strange pleasure in the longing itself.
In the first stanza, the poem creates a tension between what is and what the speaker wishes were so. The subjunctive “were I with thee” sets up the whole dilemma of the poem. All of the poem’s energy surrounds the absence of the beloved. The speaker’s imagining of the fulfillment of the night that could be, if the beloved were only there, evokes by contrast the intense longing that she is actually experiencing.
The image of the boat securely resting in port further suggests an opposite reality: the speaker’s heart is being tossed around on the seas of passion even as she describes consolation. While the speaker’s image of the boat in port evokes feelings of comfort and security, it also emphasizes the speaker’s different reality: she is not in this comfortable port she imagines, and not with her lover, but still out on the sea being knocked around by the winds of desire.
This doesn’t seem to distress the speaker all that much, however. On the contrary, the final stanza suggests the deliciousness of this longing in its own right. From the images of storms and seeking in the second stanza, the speaker abruptly transitions into the very different image of “rowing in Eden.” The seas of Eden—flawless, shameless, and calm—suggest a deep pleasure in the speaker’s at-sea-ness. Even if it isn’t everything she wishes for, there’s a delight in her desire for her beloved.
The speaker’s exclamation, “Ah! - the Sea!”, further emphasizes the complexity of her response to her own predicament. That “Ah!”, following both the images of the storm and of Eden, could equally be a cry of pleasure or of pain, once again suggesting the intensity of the speaker's desire itself. The poem then ends on a return to the subjunctive: “Might I but moor - tonight - / In thee!” In her passion, the speaker’s feeling of “if only” has become itself both a storm and a resting-place.
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Religious Fervor
The nature of the love expressed in this poem is complex and, in some ways, unresolved: the “thee” the speaker addresses could as easily be God as a human lover. And if the reader does interpret the speaker’s beloved to be God, then the poem implies the simultaneous ecstasy and comfort of faith.
In this reading, the speaker’s longing for God is passionate and physical. God appears here as a sheltering home for the speaker, but the comfort of God’s embrace is also—like sexual passion—wild and ecstatic.
The clear distinction between the speaker as a boat and God as a port suggests the difference in the kinds of love these two beings experience and provide: the speaker searches, while God receives and shelters. The image of God as a “port” further works to create a sense of homecoming. The port is the safe, comfortable place where the speaker can be permanently secure. However, the winds continue to whip outside in this image: the “port” of God does not just mean eternal calm, but eternal passion.
The speaker’s desire to discard the “compass” and “chart” of the second stanza suggests the longing to be done with seeking, to rest—and also to move past intellectual human ways of navigating the world. In this image, the security of God could be imagined as something that goes deeper than any kind of human understanding.
In the final stanza, “Rowing in Eden” has obvious religious connotations, providing a vision of reunion with the joys of paradise: in the Bible, Eden is humanity’s original home, a place of shameless bliss. As in the earthier reading of the poem, there’s a sense here that the delights of longing are all part of the experience of love: desire, for God as much as for a lover, is itself a pleasure.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Wild nights - Wild nights!”
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Line 1
Wild nights - Wild nights!
"Wild nights - Wild nights!" begins with a bang. Many of the poem's feelings and themes are already present in this single powerful line.
The quick repetition of "Wild nights - Wild nights!" (a technique known as epizeuxis), with that emphatic exclamation point at the end, gives readers a sense of intensity right from the start. These are not the kind of wild nights that one can quietly wait out with a nice cup of tea. The speaker's insistence on this phrase puts readers right in the middle of the storm with her: the reader may be spurred to imagine her looking out into the wind and the rain, marveling at nature's power.
Consider the speaker's use of the word "wild" to describe these nights. Wildness has connotations not only of intensity, but of beastly ferocity: the untamed energy of the natural world. Already, then, readers get a hint that there may be something animal and bodily in this storm.
One could read the metrical feet in this first line as either iambs or spondees: that is, either placing stresses on the even-numbered syllables, like so:
Wild nights - Wild nights!
Or stressing every word equally, like so:
Wild nights - Wild nights!
Either way, there is a drumbeat rhythm to the words, like a pounding heart, that again reflects the intensity of the speaker's feelings. This powerful rhythm is supported and tied together with strong assonance on the long, flat /i/ sound:
Wild nights - Wild nights!
No other vowel sound appears in this first line. This assonance not only contributes to the feeling of power already discussed, but might make readers think of the "I" who is, as will soon be clear, all alone in this wild night.
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Line 2
Were I with thee
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Lines 3-4
Wild nights should be
Our luxury! -
Lines 5-6
Futile - the winds -
To a Heart in port - -
Lines 7-8
Done with the Compass -
Done with the Chart! -
Lines 9-10
Rowing in Eden -
Ah - the Sea! -
Lines 11-12
Might I but moor - tonight -
In thee!
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“Wild nights - Wild nights!” Symbols
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Storms
From the speaker's very first exclamation, the reader feels the intensity of the stormy weather she's going through—both externally and internally. Storms, in this poem, represent both the pleasures and dangers of desire. The speaker's description of the "wild nights" as having the potential for "luxury" suggests that, while her passion is violent and potentially perilous as a storm, there's also something delicious about it.
The speaker goes on to describe the storm-winds of passion as unable to have any effect on the heart that's found security with its beloved. But it's important to note that those winds don't go away: finding safe harbor doesn't diminish a tempestuous passion, but keeps the lover secure in the midst of those howling winds.
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Seafaring
Images of boats, sailors, harbors, and navigation help the speaker to imagine her relation to her beloved. The speaker presents her own heart—and by extension herself—as a sailor or a boat. The beloved, meanwhile, is the harbor. These images set the speaker up as wanderer and seeker and the beloved as shelter and destination, symbolism reinforced with the navigational images of "compass" and "chart." The symbols of boat and port also make room for an intensely sexual image of the speaker literally entering the beloved.
Notably, there's no suggestion that even if the speaker and her beloved were together, they'd ever head for dry land: even if the speaker is securely docked in her beloved, the passionate ocean is always going to be a part of the picture.
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The Ocean
If the lovers are a boat and a port, their passion is not just a storm, but a stormy ocean. In its depth, its violence, its vastness, and its changeability, the ocean has always been a symbol for love. This poem's ocean symbolism in particular plays on the sea's different moods.
The sea appears here both as a storm-lashed wilderness from which the speaker hopes to retire, and as a place of heavenly delight. In the second stanza, the ocean is beset by winds, and the speaker a sailor; in the third stanza, the ocean is Eden, and the speaker is "rowing" there—a gentler sort of activity than trying to navigate a sailing ship home in a storm. The double nature of passion is thus represented in the ocean's different possibilities: it's equally a place of dangers and delights.
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Eden
Eden is a powerful symbol not only for idyllic pleasure, but for a more complicated emotional state: shamelessness.
In the Biblical book of Genesis, Eden is humanity's original home: a perfect garden where Adam and Eve live in bliss. They're cast out of the garden when they eat the forbidden fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. What happens when they eat this fruit? They realize that they're naked, and they become ashamed.
In raising the image of Eden here, the speaker brings up not only bliss and sexual freedom, but shameless sexual freedom. Together, this symbol suggests, she and her lover experience a full and strangely innocent passion.
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“Wild nights - Wild nights!” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Alliteration
There are a few moments of alliteration in the poem, some of which are due to the poem's use of repetition. Only a few initial sounds are repeated and repeated: /w/, /n/, /d/, and /m/.
The most persistent sound in the poem is the /w/ that appears in "wild," "were," and "with" in the first stanza, and "winds" and "with" in the second. This persistent /w/ might mimic the whooshing of storm winds. It might also link wildness, windiness, and with-ness (i.e., togetherness) in the reader's mind—three ideas that share an intimate and complex connection in the poem's meaning, too.
Later, the /d/ sounds in the repeated "Done" of lines 7 and 8 land with a thump, as if those devices are being thrown down. In line 11, the soft /m/ sounds of "Might" and "moor" fit in with the final stanza's mood of blissful softness: "Rowing in Eden" might well make a person go "mmmmm. (Take a look at the Devices entry on "consonance" for further discussion of how the poem's alliteration weaves a pattern of harder and softer sounds.)
Alliteration is also important to this poem in the places where it stops. Take a look at those few lines where no alliteration appears (4, 6, 9, 10, and 11). The reader may notice that these lines have one thing in common: they're all moments when the speaker is imagining scenes of greater peace, delight, and calm than what she's presently experiencing. The break in the density of alliteration also reflects an all-too-brief break in the speaker's turmoil.
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Apostrophe
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Assonance
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Caesura
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Consonance
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Enjambment
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Repetition
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Extended Metaphor
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“Wild nights - Wild nights!” Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Luxury
- Futile
- Port
- Compass
- Chart
- Eden
- Moor
Luxury-
Indulgent delight, with a connotation of voluptuousness or excess. (Interestingly for this particular poem, the oldest meaning of the word is specifically related to sexual pleasure.)
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Wild nights - Wild nights!”
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Form
The poem uses only three punchy stanzas, each of which is a quatrain (meaning it has four lines).
While this poem follows no particular form, it does reflect a lot of Emily Dickinson's distinctive poetic habits—while breaking from some others. Dickinson has a particularly strong and recognizable voice. She's known for writing short, rhythmical poems, mostly in iambic feet. While this poem follows that trend, she's here using shorter lines than she often does: only two feet per line, where often she'll vary lines of three and four feet. Readers can see this shortness on the page. The poem is compact, tightly wound yet full of meaning and emotion—perhaps reflecting the intensity of the speaker's desire ready to burst forth.
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Meter
"Wild nights - Wild nights!" is a very rough iambic dimeter. This means it mostly has two iambs per line, poetic units consisting of an unstressed beat followed by a stressed beat, da DUM). This rhythm feels like a heart beat—da DUM da DUM da DUM—which makes sense, given that the poem is about the speaker's intense passion. The poem's meter isn't totally regular, however, and moves through a complex variety of metrical feet.
Its first stanza, for instance, actually starts off with two intense spondees, or poetic feet with two stressed beats in a row:
Wild nights - Wild nights!
This reflects the intensity of the speaker's feelings in this moment. The poem then moves into steady iambic dimeter, with the exception of the spondee (Wild nights) opening line 3:
Were I with thee
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!Line 5 then opens with a trochee (essentially the opposite of an iamb; stressed-unstressed), while line 6 starts with an anapest (two unstressed beats followed by a stressed beat, da da DUM) followed by another iamb:
Futile - the winds -
To a Heart in port -The feet are, clearly, all over the place. The main constant in this whirlwind of rhythms is the steady beat of dimeter—that is, except in the very last stanza of the poem, when the "tonight," which would metrically complete the last line, hangs on to the end of line 11 instead, leaving that last "in thee" of line 12 all alone:
Might I but moor - tonight -
In thee!This is an effect the reader can only really see on the page, and it's easy for it to slip our notice: read the poem aloud and it'll sound quite regular.
The meter here brilliantly mirrors the poem's emotions. Between the steady, constant heartbeats of the speaker's desire, everything is in a frenzy.
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Rhyme Scheme
"Wild nights - Wild nights!" uses a deceptively complex rhyme scheme. The poem's shortness and its two-beat lines might at first make the reader imagine that the rhyme scheme is going to be a classic ABAB or ABCB pattern. But when you chart the rhyme, look what you find:
ABBB CDED FBAB
While the poem does rhyme the second and fourth lines of each of its stanzas—a familiar pattern in rhyming poetry—what happens in between is suitably wild.
The poem loves rhyming on a long /ee/ sound, which ends many of its most loaded and powerful words: "thee," "Sea," "luxury." The first stanza is unusual in its use of three rhymes in a row. This linkage of "thee," "be" and "luxury" brings home the sweet intensity of the poet's emotion: the sound introduced into the poem with "thee" just won't let go. In the last stanza, the poem returns not only to its /ee/ rhyme but to the word "thee" itself—the "thee" who is the motivating aim of this poem.
Something similar happens with the cross-poem linkage of "nights" and "tonight": the speaker's desire for the beloved to be with her right this very instant is highlighted by the return, not just to general "nights," but to this specific "tonight."
The second stanza uses slant rhyme, pairing "port" with "chart." This almost-rhyme helps to suggest the speaker's current state: while she longs to be "Done with the Chart!", she isn't, and the imperfection of the rhyme drives that home.
The complexity of this rhyme scheme also allows the "winds," the "Compass," and "Eden" to stand alone and unrhymed, giving them a special prominence in the poem.
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“Wild nights - Wild nights!” Speaker
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Readers get no real clues about the speaker's identity. Though this guide has referred to the speaker as a "her," she isn't even necessarily female (though we can argue that many of Dickinson's love poems seem to be told from her own perspective). But while it's hard to say who the speaker might be, it's easy to get a sense of her personality: one thing readers can see for sure is that this person is wildly passionate. The intensity of her emotion tells readers that her inner life is rich, imaginative, and tempestuous.
The speaker's image of herself as a sailor is a good example of this passion. She feels that her frustrated desire has made her a wanderer, tossed around on a vast and stormy ocean.
Though she feels at the mercy of her passion, the speaker also has the power to comfort herself with her own imagination. In a moment of delight in the last stanza, she imagines her storm-tossed wandering as "rowing in Eden." This image of her sea-wanderings in paradise suggests that, while she's overpowered by her emotions, her vivid imagination allows her to experience those feelings fully and to transform them into something delicious. Caught in both a literal and a figurative storm, the speaker uses her imagination to explore and transform the passion that has gripped her.
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“Wild nights - Wild nights!” Setting
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The poem could be said to be set in two places: one real, and one imaginary. Appropriately for a poem about overwhelming desire, the imaginary place is much more vividly portrayed than the real one.
The first and last stanzas hint at a literal storm on a real night; one can imagine the speaker looking out into the wind and rain and seeing a reflection of her own passions. But these are just the barest of hints: all readers really know about the speaker's surroundings is that, frustratingly for her, they don't contain her beloved.
The imagined setting is a stormy ocean and a blissful harbor. But both these places are paradoxical. Storms still rage around the security of the harbor (though they can't do any damage to the heart that docks there), and the ocean transforms in the last stanza from a place of dangerous winds to paradise itself.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Wild nights - Wild nights!”
Literary Context
Dickinson fits into her literary context by standing out from it. Though she wrote in the mid to late 1800s, some critics class her as a proto-Modernist (a 20th-century literary movement) for her psychological subtlety and experimentation with form. She was, certainly, one of the greatest voices of American Romanticism, a school of thought that believed in the importance of the self, nature, and the individual human relationship with God.
Her thought and work were influenced by the English Romantics of a generation or two before her (especially Wordsworth and Coleridge's revival of ballad meter), by contemporary American transcendentalist writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, by the novels of the Victorian English writer Charlotte Bronte, and by Shakespeare.
Critics' best guess is that "Wild nights - Wild nights!" was written around 1861, during Dickinson's most intense and productive period of writing. During this time, she wrote hundreds of poems, keeping them in little hand-bound booklets. (You can find a link to an image of her manuscript for this poem in the "Resources" section of this guide.) She shared these with no one; they were only discovered after her death by her sister Lavinia, who got them published.
Dickinson herself offered this definition of poetry in a letter to her friend Thomas Wentworth Higginson: “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way?”
Historical Context
Dickinson lived in a chaotic world, but was famously separate from it: at the age of 35, she became a recluse, and only rarely emerged from her family home thereafter.
But all through Dickinson's most productive period of writing, the American Civil War was raging. This bloody and drawn-out conflict was (to put it mildly) disheartening and disillusioning to all who lived through it, but its horrors also inspired a counter-surge of optimistic and forward-thinking political and literary movements.
A Northerner who lived her whole life in Amherst, Massachusetts, Dickinson was firmly on the side of the Union forces. In the face of the public turmoil and division of the war, Dickinson wrote poems passionately invested in human inner life. "Wild nights - Wild nights!", while it shows no direct connection to its historical context beyond a feeling of turmoil, responds to its time in its seriousness and depth of feeling.
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More “Wild nights - Wild nights!” Resources
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External Resources
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An article by Dickinson's publisher, Thomas Higginson — This 1891 article from the Atlantic is Dickinson's publisher's account of his correspondence with her and the posthumous printing of her poems.
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A Short Biography of Dickinson — The Poetry Foundation's biography of Dickinson, with links to more of her poems.
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Dickinson's Manuscript Copy of the Poem — The manuscript for "Wild nights - Wild nights!" in Dickinson's own handwriting.
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The Emily Dickinson Museum — The official website for the Emily Dickinson museum, with further information on her life and works.
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Sarah Arvio's Reading of "Wild nights - Wild nights!" — A short piece from the Poetry Society of America on a writer's first experience reading this poem (including opinions on some of the readings discussed in this guide).
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Emily Dickinson
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