April is Poetry Month: Day 17

Hawaii, Oct, 2018, J. Doolittle

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!

                        Emily Dickinson

From: Into the Garden: A Wedding Anthology, Poetry and Prose on Love and Marriage, Edited by Robert Hass & Stephen Mitchell,  Harper Perennial, 1993.

Emily probably wrote this passionate poem when she was about 28 or 29 years old.  She never married and lived reclusively, but had a rich inner life.  The authors feature this poem in their introduction and I'm going to share their interpretation.

"I've just recently realized why this poem is so mysterious and beautiful to me.  When you first read it, you get the impression that the speaker in the poem is throwing out the charts to navigate by the freedom of her feelings in the open sea.  But it isn't so.  She has thrown them out because she is in port, in safe harbor.  And that, I saw, is what we want from each other most intimately: wildness and safety, or a magical space that includes both.  That is what is mean to row in Eden.  Dickinson herself came to believe, I think, that the dream wedding was only possible in a passionate mind, which is to say in a poem.  I don't think she thought you could have both in the real world.  It's my experience that you can have both, not all of the time but some of the time and that this possibility depends on the other more durable things that love means.  And the root of these is trust."