Lauren Groff on Work and Love
This week’s story, “ Between the Shadow and the Soul ,” is about a fifty-year-old woman named Eliza who has
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‘Wild nights – Wild nights!’ The energy and exultation with which Emily Dickinson opens this, one of her most passionately felt poems, encourages us to share the excitement and passion, or at least dares us to try to resist it. Although this is not perhaps the opening line of Emily Dickinson’s that most readily springs to readers’ minds, the poem as a whole is worthy of close analysis. Summary Wild nights – Wild nights! Were I with thee Wild nights should be Our luxury! It’s always dangerous to attempt to paraphrase a poem, especially the distinctive style of an Emily Dickinson poem. But really, that opening stanza strikes us for its modern sound: it’s almost a chat-up line, albeit more elegantly put than most: ‘I tell you, if I was with you tonight, we’d have the wildest time, believe me. Know what I mean? Wink wink.’ Note, however, the shift from the first into the second line: ‘Wild nights!’ is not the description of some actual experienced passion, but rather an exclamatory longing, a yearning for something that the speaker wishes were true but isn’t: ‘Were I with thee’, the next line proclaims, switching to the subjunctive mood where things are wished for rather than real. And the sexual playfulness within the stanza does seem to be deliberate. The triple repetition of the phrase ‘Wild nights’ – twice in the opening line, and then again at the beginning of the third line – reinforces the idea of wild passion which the speaker envisions between herself and the addressee of the poem. Futile – the winds – To a Heart in port – Done with the Compass – Done with the Chart! That middle stanza, however, complicates this initial analysis: these ‘wild nights’ would be the lovers’ ‘luxury’ because they would be together, a calm amidst the storm, and the winds would blow in vain, trying to blow them off course. But their hearts would be ‘in port’ and have no need for their compass or chart, since they would have sailed their boats to each other and have no […]
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This week’s story, “ Between the Shadow and the Soul ,” is about a fifty-year-old woman named Eliza who has
The British realist director Mike Leigh loves the term “character actor,” which he uses often and with zeal. To him,
