The greatest nighttime poems selected by Dr Oliver Tearle

Poetry isn't all sweet and light, of course. In fact, much of it is concerned with the darker aspects of the natural world, whether it's the mystery or solemnity of dark-time darkness or some other, more abstract or metaphorical kind of darkness ('O dark dark dark', as T. Due south. Eliot put it in Four Quartets). Hither, we offer ten of the best poems nearly darkness of various kinds.

i. Charlotte Smith, 'Written nigh a Port on a Nighttime Evening'.

All is blackness shadow simply the lucid line
Marked by the calorie-free surf on the level sand,
Or where afar the ship-lights faintly shine
Like wandering fairy fires, that often on country
Misled the pilgrim …

This sonnet was written by one of the great proto-Romantic poets of the 2d half of the eighteenth century. Smith's sonnets anticipate Romanticism partly because nature in her poetry is so often feared with an awesome power that verges on the terrifying: 'life's long darkling way' is heart-searching and full of menace hither.

2. Lord Byron, 'Darkness'.

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The vivid sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal infinite,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morning came and went—and came, and brought no day …

This poem was inspired by a curious incident: the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia, which drastically altered the conditions conditions across the earth and led to 1816 being branded 'the Twelvemonth without a Summertime'. The same effect also led to Byron's trip to Lake Geneva and his ghost-story writing competition, which produced Mary Shelley'due south masterpiece Frankenstein.

For Byron, the extermination of the sun seemed like a dream, still it was 'no dream' but a foreign and almost sublimely terrifying reality.

3. Robert Browning, 'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came'.

If at his counsel I should plow aside
Into that ominous tract which, all concord,
Hides the Night Tower. Still acquiescingly
I did turn every bit he pointed: neither pride
Nor hope rekindling at the end descried,
So much as gladness that some end might exist …

A grotesque quasi-medieval dramatic monologue detailing the quest of the titular Roland, this verse form was produced in an attempt to overcome writer's block: in 1852 Browning had prepare himself the New year's Resolution to write a new poem every day, and this vivid dreamscape is what arose from his fevered imagination.

Browning borrowed the championship from a line in Shakespeare's King Lear; the character of Roland as he appears in Browning's poem has in turn inspired Stephen King to write his Dark Tower series, while J. Chiliad. Rowling borrowed the word 'slughorn' from the poem when creating the name of her character Horace Slughorn.

4. Emily Dickinson, 'We abound accustomed to the Dark'.

We abound accustomed to the Dark –
When Light is put away –
Every bit when the Neighbor holds the Lamp
To witness her Skilful bye –

A Moment – We Uncertain pace
For newness of the night –
So – fit our Vision to the Dark –
And come across the Route – erect …

The first line of this verse form too provides the verse form with its main theme: the way our eyes conform to the darkness, just every bit our minds adapt to the bleakness of life and contemplation of the 'night' that is death.

5. Thomas Hardy, 'The Darkling Thrush'.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead,
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited.
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt and small,
With blast-beruffled feather,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom …

This classic Hardy poem captures the mood of a winter evening equally the sun, 'the weakening eye of day', sets below the horizon and gives way to dusk on New year's day's Eve. Hardy hears a thrush singing, and wonders whether the thrush is aware of some reason to be hopeful for the coming new twelvemonth, some reason of which Hardy himself is unaware.

In 'The Darkling Thrush' itself nosotros are given clues that faith is on the speaker'due south heed. In the 3rd stanza, when the thrush of the title appears ('darkling' is an old poetic word for 'in darkness' – it besides, incidentally, echoes Matthew Arnold's employ of the word in his famous verse form about declining faith, 'Dover Beach', published in 1867), its vocal is described as 'evensong', suggesting the church service, while the apply of the discussion 'soul' also suggests the spiritual. (Such a religiously inflected assay of Hardy's poem is reinforced by 'carolings' in the next stanza.)

6. Gerard Manley Hopkins, 'I wake and feel the brutal of night, non solar day'.

I wake and experience the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours nosotros have spent
This night! what sights y'all, heart, saw; means you lot went!
And more must, in nonetheless longer calorie-free'southward delay …

One of Hopkins'south 'Terrible Sonnets', this verse form is one of the finest evocations of a sleepless night that English language verse has produced. When we wake to find that it's not withal morning time only we are still surrounded by darkness, and undergo some sort of 'dark nighttime of the soul', nosotros frequently feel every bit Hopkins describes here. For him it is a spiritual battle every bit well equally a mere case of indisposition.

As then often with Hopkins, the spiritual and psychological are experienced as a vivid visceral force that is physical every bit well as metaphysical: his low and uncertainty weigh upon him like heartburn or indigestion ('heartburn' picking upwards on the poet'due south more abstract address to his 'heart' in the tertiary line of the verse form, but also leading into the 'claret' mentioned a couple of lines subsequently).

vii. Carl Sandburg, 'Moonset'.

This short poem is virtually actively 'unpoetical' in its imagery, and offers a fresh expect at the moon. The verse form'south last image of 'dark listening to dark' is especially eye-catching.

8. Edward Thomas, 'The Nighttime Forest'.

Dark is the wood and deep, and overhead
Hang stars like seeds of lite
In vain, though not since they were sown was bred
Anything more bright …

This verse form from the wonderful nature poet Edward Thomas (1878-1917) begins by describing a forest at nighttime, in a higher place whose copse the stars smoothen similar 'seeds of low-cal'.

nine. Joseph Campbell, 'Darkness'.

One of the offset 'modern' poems written in English, this short lyric past the Irish-built-in poet Joseph Campbell (1879-1944) shares affinities with the poems of T. Due east. Hulme, and seems in some respects to prefigure the 'bog' poems of Seamus Heaney. You can read Campbell'southward 'Darkness' by clicking on the link below, which will too take you to three other short poems past Campbell.

10. Philip Larkin, 'Going'.

Philip Larkin never learned, in Sigmund Freud's memorable phrase most King Lear, to make friends with the necessity of dying. 'Going' is an early on example of Larkin'south mature appointment with the terrifying realisation that death will come up for us all.

In ten unrhymed lines, 'Going' explores death without ever mentioning it by name, instead referring to it, slightly elliptically, as 'an evening' that is 'coming in'. Larkin uses the metaphor of the coming evening – an evening which 'lights no lamps' because there is no hope of staving off this darkness, the darkness of decease.

Continue to explore classic verse with these curt poems nigh decease and dying, our pick of the best poems almost eyes, and these archetype poems nearly secrets. We too recommend The Oxford Book of English Verse  – peradventure the best poesy anthology on the market (we offer our pick of the best poetry anthologies here).

The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough Academy. He is the author of, amidst others, The Secret Library: A Volume-Lovers' Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Groovy State of war, The Waste State and the Modernist Long Poem.