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.
Era
victorian
43 poems
victorian
Tell All the Truth but Tell It Slant
Tell the whole truth, but tell it slant. Dickinson’s compact defense of indirection argues that truth too bright to bear must be eased in gradually or it blinds.
I’m Nobody! Who Are You?
Two quatrains that make a boast out of self-erasure. Dickinson defends anonymity, recruits the reader into a secret club, and reduces fame to a frog in a bog.
In the Bleak Midwinter
Christina Rossetti’s frozen Christmas poem is stranger and bleaker than Holst’s tune lets on. A close reading of the world that refuses to receive.
Loveliest of Trees
A twenty-year-old does the math on how many springs he has left and decides to spend them looking at a tree. The least dramatic carpe diem in English, and one of the most exact.
The Lady of Shalott
Everyone reads it as the artist sealed off from life. But the 1842 revision strips away the explanation and leaves something stranger and crueler: a death received by the world as a pretty corpse.
Matthew Arnold
The Victorian poet and critic behind “Dover Beach”: a life spent bridging faith and doubt, Romantic feeling and classical restraint, poetry and the criticism that made him the “sage” of his age.
A Bird Came Down the Walk
A bird eats a worm raw, then rows off through the air like an oar through silent water. Dickinson’s most exact nature poem watches a wild thing right up to the moment it flees.
The Soul Selects Her Own Society
From a whole nation the soul chooses exactly one, ignores a kneeling emperor at her gate, then closes the valves of her attention “Like Stone” — Dickinson’s most absolute poem about choosing.
When I Was One-and-Twenty
At twenty-one, the speaker ignores a wise man’s warning not to give his heart away. A year later, heartbroken, he admits the advice was right. A reading of Housman’s folk-song lyric on love, youth, and regret.
There’s a Certain Slant of Light
A particular angle of December light gives a hurt with no scar. Dickinson’s most precise poem about despair treats a winter mood as a message from God.
I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died
Everyone in the room is braced for the sacred moment. What arrives is a fly. Dickinson’s most devastating poem is about what death looks like when the King doesn’t come.