Night by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
As the landscape fades into night, the day's crowds, clamour, pursuits, and cares vanish from sight. The speaker compares ordinary life to a palimpsest: beneath its trivial daily entries, a hidden ideal revives when the world ceases to intrude.
By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow · Genre: Sonnet, Meditative Poetry · 166 words
First lines
Into the darkness and the hush of night / Slowly the landscape sinks, and fades away, / And with it fade the phantoms of the day, / The ghosts of men and things, that haunt the light, / The crowd, the clamor, the pursuit, the flight, / The unprofitable splendor and display, / The agitations, and the cares that prey / Upon our hearts, all vanish out of sight. / The better life begins; the world no more / Molests us; all its records we erase / From the dull common-place book of our lives, / That like a palimpsest is written o'er / With trivial incidents of time and place, / And lo! the ideal, hidden beneath, revives.
Genres
- Sonnet — Fourteen lines follow an ABBAABBA CDECDE rhyme scheme, turning from the disappearance of daytime disturbances to the revival of an inward ideal.
- Meditative Poetry — The speaker reflects on relief from daily cares and compares ordinary life's accumulated incidents to writing that conceals an ideal beneath it.
Tags
quiet · daily cares · ideal life · palimpsest · sonnet
What this Textopian page supports
Night is listed on Textopian as a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, dated Date unknown.
This source record anchors work identity, reading entry points, and catalog context for checking claims about the work.
- Work type: Poem
- Author: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- Date: Date unknown
- Language: English
- Genres: Sonnet, Meditative Poetry
- Length: 166 words
- Structure: 1 section, 1 paragraphs
- Reading fit: Fairly Difficult (10th-12th Grade)
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