"Wild Nights – Wild Nights!" is an 1861 poem by Emily Dickinson. It was included in her posthumous collection of Poems, Second Series, published November 9, 1891.Wineapple, Brenda. White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson & Thomas Wentworth Higginson. New York: Anchor Books, 2009: 296.
Text of the poem {| ! scope="col" width="300px" | Close transcriptionFr#269 in: Emily Dickinson Archive.
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!
Analysis Dickinson's posthumous editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson thought the poem was too erotic for a woman he deemed pure and was initially reluctant to print the poem, "lest the malignant read into it more than that virgin recluse ever dream of putting there".Leiter, Sharon. Critical Companion to Emily Dickinson: A Literary Reference to Her Life and Work. New York: Facts on File, Inc., 2007: 231. Modern readers now, however, recognize the poem as one of her most erotic and find in the text Dickinson's understanding of sexual passion.
The poem is structurally unusual for Dickinson, using lines with only two metric feet instead of her typical three and four feet iambs. Judith Farr writes that the opening spondees makes the poem theatrical, turbulent, and stormy, appropriate for the subject matter, and shows her interest in the Brontë sisters and Wuthering Heights.Farr, Judith. The Passion of Emily Dickinson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992: 229. She also notes that "Wild Nights" is perhaps the most "Dickinsonian" of her poems in that it is "ironic, paradoxical, voluptuous, and terse all at once."Farr, Judith. The Passion of Emily Dickinson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992: 229–230.
For the Poetry Society of America's Reading Through the Decades series, Sarah Arvio writes of the poem:
In popular culture It is set in Harmonium by John Adams (1981).
Wild Nights!, a 2008 short story collection by Joyce Carol Oates, is named after the poem, which also serves as its epigraph. The collection features stories about the last days of the lives of Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Henry James, and Ernest Hemingway.
The poem is the origin of the title Wild Nights with Emily, a 2018 biopic of Dickinson starring Molly Shannon.
Actress Najarra Townsend recites the poem in its entirety in the 2017 film Mercury in Retrograde.
In the 2019 TV show Dickinson the poem serves as the title of its third episode and is read by Austin Dickinson while looking for evidence that Emily and Sue love each other.
References
Further reading
External links
Manuscript at the Emily Dickinson Archive