Night

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1789

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form and Meter

“Night” divides into six octaves, or stanzas of eight lines. Each octave follows the same ABABCCDD rhyme scheme and begins with four lines of alternating iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter. This opening meter, sometimes called common meter, is associated with popular songs and ballads. The stanzas in Blake’s “Night” deviate from this common meter after the first four lines, however. The last four lines of each stanza maintain their iambic feet (with one unstressed syllable following a stressed) but vary between tetrameter, trimeter, and dimeter.

Either a colon or a period separates common meter and Blake’s variable meter in the last four lines of each octave. This separation in meter and punctuation suggests a turn in the speaker’s thought or point of view. In the third stanza, for instance, the speaker presents the image of “wolves and tigers” (Line 25) in the first half and comments on what will happen “if they rush dreadful” (Line 29) in the second half. This turn from the concrete image to the abstract, emotional response tends to occur at the same point in each of the stanzas.

Repetition

The poems in Songs of Innocence and of Experience are relatively simple in terms of language and poetic structure. Readers often interpret the poems—particularly those in the first half of the book, like “Night,”—as works for children. One of the main qualities that “Night” shares with children’s literature is the use of paired down and repetitive language.

The speaker repeats a collection of words like “bright” (Lines 12, 46), and “weep” (Lines 21, 26, 44) in addition to words that refer to animals in the poem. The speaker also relies on repeated images, such as birds “in their nest” (Line 3) and birds “in every thoughtless nest” (Line 17). These repeated images add to the poem’s sense of simplicity.

The speaker also employs anaphora, or the repeated use the same words or phrases to open a line. The speaker begins two lines, “Where flocks [. . .] Where lambs” (Lines 10, 11), to place emphasis both on the “happy grove” (Line 9) and on the distinction between a “flock” and a “lamb.” The speaker uses a similar technique when describing the angels watching over the creatures. “They look” (Line 17) at the birds and “They visit” (Line 19) the beasts using similar grammatical structures to suggest similarities between the two categories of animals.

Personification

Blake uses personification to characterize both the night and the animals that inhabit it. The most obvious case of personification, or the attribution of human qualities to non-human things, is the speaking lion of the penultimate stanza. The speaker, however, personifies animals throughout the poem by suggesting them capable of “weeping” (Line 21) and by drawing equivalents between human beds and bird’s “nest[s]” (Line 3; See: Themes).

The suggestion that animals are able to weep is an example of the pathetic fallacy, where one attributes human emotions to non-human things. Blake’s speaker also performs this technique when he engages with the moon, which, “[w]ith silent delight / Sits and smiles on the night” (Lines 7-8). The phrase “happy grove” (Line 9) works as a descriptor, but it also plays on the possibility that a place itself could be happy.