Emily Dickinson Rowing In Eden

Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts on May 10, 1830. She lived a fairly uncomplicated life, rarely leaving her place of birth. In 1847, she graduated from Amherst Academy and then attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary for one year. She had little to no travel experience; her family once took a trip to Philadelphia and Washington (Brand 12). After a long period of seclusion, she died of kidney illness in her family home at the age of 55 (Biography.com Editors).
Dickinson wrote many poems in her lifetime on a variety of subjects, including hope and death. She penned over 600 poems in as little as a four-year period from 1859 to 1862 (Brand 16). However, she did not become widely recognized as a poet until after her death and

This poem in particular deals with the abstract anyway and the last paragraph makes it that much more obscure. Once again, the phrase, “rowing in Eden” lends a religious theme to the poem. Additionally, at the time it was published, Dickinson’s friend and editor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, actually expressed his concerns that the public might read more suggestive context into the poetry than Dickinson had originally meant (eNotes.com). Her use of nature imagery attached to figurative ideas as in “Wild Nights – Wild Nights!” is also a trademark of her style as well as her use of dashes and seemingly random capitalization which was often highly criticized by those who reviewed her writing (White 59-60).
The controlling metaphor in this poem is the overarching theme of a storm. “Wild Nights” refers to wind and rain on the sea. Many times, Dickinson mentions seafaring objects like the compass and chart used to find her way. The lines that say she could moor in “Thee” once again paint a picture of the narrator as a boat in a harbor or tossed by waves on the sea previously to finding the harbor. This analogy and repetitive use of a controlling metaphor is once again typical of Dickinson’s work (Juhasz