Dickinson titles, take 2

I did this for an english assignment and had to analyze it. I really liked it for some reason, so I'm putting it on here. Tell me what you think.


Wild Nights, Wild Nights!
God is a distant, stately Lover –
I cannot live without You.
I’m Nobody! Who are You?
This is my Letter to the world –

Because I could not Stop for Death –
He preached upon “breadth” till it argued Him narrow.
This World is not Conclusion –
There’s a certain Slant of Light.

I dwell in possibility
Because I Could Not stop for death –
My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun –
I never lost as much but twice
Wild nights, wild nights.

This is my letter to the World


I began with “Wild Nights, Wild Nights!” and left it all capitalized to illustrate a title, an opener that would set the scene and leave a reader interested to find out more, like what made the night “wild,” and who is involved? The next line answers ‘the who’ and ‘the why’ – the narrator has a love affair with God, and he is her caretaker. Her life depends on him and his guidance – without Him she is nobody; she has no physical identity to call her own. However, she questions his reliability to save her from her confusion over who she really is. “Nobody” and “You” are capitalized to show names, and to emphasize that the only character with a real name in the poem is God, and that the woman has nothing to call herself. She then says “this is my Letter,” a transition into her retelling of what happened during this wild night.
The narrator could not stop death from approaching. She was losing her physical self because she had already lost all sense of her identity, her mental being. “Stop” and “Death” are both capitalized because they are both out of her control and have more power over her. In the next line, He and Him are the only words capitalized, illustrating her dependence on her lover, and also following the way the Bible describes God. He argues, fights for her freedom from her daily struggles, proving that he is loyal to her and cares for her well-being.
“This World is not Conclusion” – her life does not end here, and the dash placed at the end of the line indicates that there is more to be said. Although she has given in to her death, she will go to heaven and be united with God again. The material world has concluded, but only opens up an entirely new spiritual world. This world is her certain slant in the light of the darkness of the wild night.
“I Could Not stop for death” is said a second time, this time with the emphasis on “could not.” Here the narrator officially admits her surrender, letting the reader know that this is what has happened and that she is no longer resisting. At this point, her life is a loaded gun, ready to release the bullet and fly into her new life on a different side. She “never lost as much but twice,” then “wild nights” is said twice. This stanza contains two repeated lines and words (stop for death and wild nights), both of them said twice. The narrator has two selves, the physical and the mental, and passes from the material world into the second world, which is the spiritual. Even though she has “lost” her life in the body, she moves on to where she will be happier. “Wild nights, wild nights” was an intimate, personal decision for her lover.
And finally, the poem ends in a single line, repeating the last line of the first stanza – “This is my letter to the World”, and this time the emphasis is on letter, not world. We have read her first letter, her explanation, and now we turn the attention to her World, her destination from one of confusion to one of happiness. Similar to Whitman’s poems, the line ends without a period, showing that this is not the end of her story.