E-Reads: Ecstasy & Desire in Emily Dickinson
Welcome to E-Reads, where Boshemia cofounder E shares what she’s reading lately.
The only authenticated portrait of Emily Dickinson, a daguerrotype taken during her single year of seminary at Mount Holyoke. Here she is 16 or 17 years old. (Source: Amherst College Archives and Special Collections)
On May 15, we mark the anniversary of the death of Emily Dickinson, one of the most enigmatic and enduring figures in American poetry. Born in 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts, Dickinson lived much of her life in seclusion, writing nearly 1,800 poems (most unpublished in her lifetime) that continue to captivate readers with their sharp lyricism, elliptical punctuation, and emotional intensity. Though she rarely left home, her work travels far: into the realms of love, death, nature, and the divine.
In honor of her death day this week, I found two poems in her collected works, ‘“Why do I love’ You, Sir?” and “Wild nights - Wild nights!” and sat with them a while.
To read Dickinson is to fall, softly and irrevocably, into the mystery of want.
There is an artful ambiguity in the poetics of desire articulated by Emily Dickinson. When we read her “love poems,” it is unclear if the intended subject is her lover, God or nature. Further still, readers and scholars debate the orientation of her love — are these poems documents of Sapphic desire for Susan Dickinson (her brother’s wife) or are the poems proclamations of Romantic Friendship? (As a reader of her letters to Sue, I patently refuse the heteronormative impulse to define Emily’s sexuality as anything but queer.)
To read Dickinson through a queer lens is not to impose modern identity categories on her work, but rather to honor the destabilizing potential of her language. Her poems revel in ambiguity—not just of subject, but of speaker, orientation, and intention. The slipperiness of “thee” allows for a refusal of binaries: her addressee is not necessarily male or female, not necessarily divine or earthly. This refusal becomes a form of resistance.
Dickinson creates a generous obscurity of the object of her desires by suffusing religious (Protestant Christian) language alongside nature metaphors, blurring romantic love with religious ecstasy.
"Why do I love" You, Sir? reads as a solemn, contemplative religious devotional. It is a nature image poem that employs nature language to ponder her love of God. In the first and most striking stanza, Dickinson attempts to answer the question posed by her title: “Because— / The Wind does not require the Grass / To answer—.” Rather than offering a definitive answer as to why she loves this “Sir,” (which I have interpreted here as God, because of her traditionally Christian capitalization of both the He and Thee pronoun), she is comparing the relationship between God and herself to the Wind and the Grass — a relationship that exists beyond language, something that is immediately understood because of their proximity to each other.
Because we can observe the way that the wind moves the grass, perhaps we can observe the way that God moves Emily.
rowing in Eden
Wild nights - Wild nights! enjoys a more enthusiastic, even ecstatic tone than the above poem, with nearly every line ending in exclamation. Here, the “thee” subject of her affection is lowercase, which makes one think this is a personal address to an individual rather than God. Notice that there is only the “thee” pronoun — ambiguous gendered. In her final stanza, Dickinson brings us from the port to the sea, placing us as “Rowing in Eden” and asking if she might “moor with thee.” The sense of solace and place that she seeks seems to be beyond the pastoral Eden, but in the emotional arms of a lover.
And yet, because of the spare language, complex syntax, and mixed imagery, it is nearly impossible to parse out in this poem and the above if Dicksinon writes on religious ecstasy or romantic love.
Emily Dickinson’s handwriting, excerpt of “Wild Nights” / Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA
What Dickinson achieves in both of these poems is not simply a coded message of love, but an embodiment of desire through syntax and sound. Her punctuation—those famous dashes—suggest interruption, breathlessness, urgency. Her fragmented grammar mimics the pulse of longing, the inability of language to fully contain the ecstasy she experiences. It’s not just what she says, but how it feels to read it: rushed, charged, destabilized. In this way, the poems themselves become erotic—language becoming flesh, suggestion becoming touch.
Regardless of interpretation, we should take care to read and remember her poems with the earnestness, passion, and potential queerness with which they were created. Her sentiments on love — whether it be to God, nature, or women, feel timeless and timely as ever to me.
Eileen Elizabeth Espinoza (“E”) is a queer Appalachian poet, essayist, and professor living in the California redwoods. Her first book, Carrying the Bones: Rituals for a Dying World (University Press of Kentucky, 2026) explores the social and sacred function of grief rituals. // @eilyana