Wild Nights – Wild Nights!
Twelve short lines of open desire. Dickinson casts longing as a storm to revel in and a harbor to reach, ending on a single wish: to moor, tonight, in thee.
Theme
desire
8 poems
desire
The Flea
A man argues a woman into bed using a flea that bit them both. It’s the most dazzling sophistry in English, and a sly comedy in which she acts while he only talks, kills the flea, and demolishes his logic with a fingernail.
La Belle Dame sans Merci
It reads like the original femme-fatale story: a beautiful faery woman lures a knight, drains him, and leaves him to die where no birds sing. But Keats built the ballad to make that reading impossible to trust — every word about the lady comes from a dying, deluded knight, we never once hear her voice, and the ghosts who brand her “without mercy” are themselves ruined men. The real subject may be desire that idealizes a woman, consumes her, then blames her when the dream ends.
Don Juan (Canto I — Selected Excerpts)
In witty ottava rima, Byron’s “Don Juan” swaps epic heroics for satire — a comic anatomy of desire and hypocrisy.
So, We’ll Go No More a Roving
A tender farewell to excess, Byron’s lyric accepts time’s limits so that love may last.
The Sound of the Trees
In “The Sound of the Trees,” Frost turns ambient rustle into the cadence of decision, where thought itself becomes the poem’s action.
After Apple-Picking
Robert Frost’s “After Apple-Picking” watches a weary farmer drift from the day’s harvest toward sleep, apples swimming behind his eyes — one of his great meditations on labor, satiety, and the sleep that may be death.
Fire and Ice
Robert Frost’s nine-line miniature takes up an ancient question — how will the world end? — and answers it as casually as a private bet. Fire or ice, desire or hate: the speaker has tasted both, and finds either one would do. What begins as cosmic speculation narrows quietly into something far more personal, until the destruction of the world rests on the flattest possible word — that ice “would suffice.” It is one of Frost’s shortest and most quoted poems, and one of his most quietly devastating.