“Wild nights — Wild nights! / Were I with thee Wild nights should be Our luxury! / Rowing in Eden — Ah — the Sea! / Might I but moor — tonight — In thee!”

The poem imagines a night so charged with feeling that the lover could row in Eden and moor at last in the beloved, and Dickinson's dashes leave the reader holding the breath she describes. It is the most quoted of her love poems and one of the few that names desire without explaining it.