The greatest nighttime poems selected by Dr Oliver Tearle

Poetry isn't all sweetness and light, of course. In fact, much of information technology is concerned with the darker aspects of the natural world, whether it's the mystery or solemnity of night-time darkness or another, more abstract or metaphorical kind of darkness ('O dark nighttime dark', as T. S. Eliot put it in 4 Quartets). Hither, we offer ten of the best poems about darkness of various kinds.

1. Charlotte Smith, 'Written near a Port on a Nighttime Evening'.

All is blackness shadow but the lucid line
Marked by the light surf on the level sand,
Or where afar the ship-lights faintly smoothen
Like wandering fairy fires, that oft on land
Misled the pilgrim …

This sonnet was written by one of the great proto-Romantic poets of the second half of the eighteenth century. Smith'south sonnets anticipate Romanticism partly considering nature in her poetry is so often feared with an awesome power that verges on the terrifying: 'life'southward long darkling mode' is brooding and full of menace here.

2. Lord Byron, 'Darkness'.

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright 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;
Morn came and went—and came, and brought no 24-hour interval …

This poem was inspired by a curious incident: the eruption of Mountain Tambora in Indonesia, which drastically contradistinct the weather weather beyond the globe and led to 1816 being branded 'the Twelvemonth without a Summertime'. The same issue also led to Byron's trip to Lake Geneva and his ghost-story writing competition, which produced Mary Shelley's masterpiece Frankenstein.

For Byron, the extermination of the lord's day seemed like a dream, still information technology was 'no dream' but a strange and almost sublimely terrifying reality.

iii. Robert Browning, 'Childe Roland to the Dark Belfry Came'.

If at his counsel I should turn aside
Into that ominous tract which, all concur,
Hides the Night Tower. Even so acquiescingly
I did turn as he pointed: neither pride
Nor promise rekindling at the end descried,
And then much as gladness that some end might be …

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

Browning borrowed the title from a line in Shakespeare'due south King Lear; the character of Roland as he appears in Browning's poem has in plough inspired Stephen King to write his Dark Tower serial, while J. M. Rowling borrowed the give-and-take 'slughorn' from the poem when creating the name of her character Horace Slughorn.

4. Emily Dickinson, 'We grow accustomed to the Night'.

We grow accustomed to the Nighttime –
When Light is put abroad –
Equally when the Neighbor holds the Lamp
To witness her Good farewell –

A Moment – We Uncertain step
For newness of the night –
And then – fit our Vision to the Night –
And meet the Road – erect …

The starting time line of this poem too provides the poem with its main theme: the way our eyes adjust to the darkness, but as our minds adapt to the bleakness of life and contemplation of the 'nighttime' that is expiry.

5. Thomas Hardy, 'The Darkling Thrush'.

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

This classic Hardy verse form captures the mood of a wintertime evening as the sun, 'the weakening eye of day', sets beneath the horizon and gives way to dusk on New year'due south 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 we are given clues that religion is on the speaker's mind. In the tertiary stanza, when the thrush of the title appears ('darkling' is an old poetic discussion for 'in darkness' – it also, incidentally, echoes Matthew Arnold'southward utilize of the word in his famous verse form about declining faith, 'Dover Embankment', published in 1867), its song is described as 'evensong', suggesting the church service, while the employ of the word 'soul' too suggests the spiritual. (Such a religiously inflected analysis of Hardy's poem is reinforced past 'carolings' in the next stanza.)

6. Gerard Manley Hopkins, 'I wake and feel the fell of night, not day'.

I wake and feel the brutal of night, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night! what sights you, eye, saw; ways yous went!
And more must, in yet longer low-cal'southward delay …

One of Hopkins'due south 'Terrible Sonnets', this poem is one of the finest evocations of a sleepless night that English poetry has produced. When we wake to discover that it's not yet morning time only we are all the same surrounded by darkness, and undergo some sort of 'dark dark of the soul', nosotros often feel equally Hopkins describes here. For him it is a spiritual battle besides equally a mere case of insomnia.

As so often with Hopkins, the spiritual and psychological are experienced as a vivid visceral force that is physical likewise as metaphysical: his depression and doubt weigh upon him like heartburn or indigestion ('heartburn' picking up on the poet'due south more abstruse accost to his 'heart' in the 3rd line of the poem, but also leading into the 'claret' mentioned a couple of lines later).

7. Carl Sandburg, 'Moonset'.

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

8. Edward Thomas, 'The Dark Forest'.

Dark is the woods and deep, and overhead
Hang stars similar seeds of light
In vain, though non since they were sown was bred
Anything more bright …

This poem from the wonderful nature poet Edward Thomas (1878-1917) begins by describing a woods at nighttime, above whose copse the stars shine like 'seeds of calorie-free'.

9. Joseph Campbell, 'Darkness'.

One of the offset 'modern' poems written in English language, this short lyric past the Irish gaelic-born 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 volition also accept you to iii other short poems past Campbell.

10. Philip Larkin, 'Going'.

Philip Larkin never learned, in Sigmund Freud's memorable phrase about King Lear, to brand friends with the necessity of dying. 'Going' is an early example of Larkin's mature engagement with the terrifying realisation that death will come for usa all.

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

Proceed to explore classic verse with these short poems about expiry and dying, our pick of the best poems about eyes, and these archetype poems about secrets. Nosotros also recommend The Oxford Book of English Poesy  – perhaps the best poetry anthology on the market (we offer our pick of the all-time poetry anthologies hither).

The writer of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough Academy. He is the author of, among others, The Undercover Library: A Book-Lovers' Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste material Land and the Modernist Long Poem.