Wild Nights Wild Nights

The poem looks organized, with the lines arranged in three quatrains (stanzas of four lines), and the tidy appearance contrasts with the intense tone to create a captivating tension. Dickinson reinforces the frenetic feeling by forgoing a predictable meter. The reader can read Line 1 as a spondee, pronouncing “Wild” as one syllable and stressing “Wild” and “nights.” Conversely, the reader can see Line 1 as iambic trimeter, not stressing the “wi” in “wild,” stressing the “ld,” and not stressing “nights.” The iambic trimeter adds to the tension, as the unstressed “nights” contrasts with the emphatic exclamation mark. Like the speaker and addressee’s relationship, the meter is an adventure with many possibilities.

Similar to the meter, the rhyme scheme follows no pattern: In Stanza 1, Lines 2, 3, and 4, with the final words of each line ending on an “e” sound. In Stanza 2, Lines 6, 7, and 8, rhyme—though the rhymes qualify as slant rhymes, requiring nonstandard pronunciations of “port,” “Compass,” and “Chart.” In Stanza 3, Dickinson returns to the “e” rhyme, pairing “Sea” (Line 10) with “thee” (Line 12), and creating a possible slant rhyme with “Eden” (Line 9).