Exultation Is the Going

Exultation Is the Going - meaning Summary

Longing for Open Unknown

The poem compares a spiritual impulse to an inward person’s first voyage to sea. Exultation describes the joy of leaving familiar ground—houses and headlands—toward a vast, unknowable eternity. Dickinson frames the experience as almost religious, a “divine intoxication” that follows the initial break from land. The closing question highlights a perceptual gap: those raised among mountains may struggle to grasp the sailor’s exhilaration. The poem therefore meditates on longing, transcendence, and how background shapes one’s ability to understand another’s ecstatic freedom.