Poem of the Day: ‘Night and Death’

Though his younger friend John Henry Newman (1801–1890) moved in one direction, to Catholicism from Protestantism, Joseph Blanco White (1775–1841) moved in the other, drifting to Anglicanism and eventually Unitarianism from the Catholicism of his childhood. Of Irish descent, he was born and educated in Spain before his religious doubts brought him to England in 1810. While editing a Spanish-language magazine in London, he was anathematized in Spain over his support for greater Latin American independence. His books “Second Travels of an Irish Gentleman in Search of a Religion” (1834) and “Observations on Heresy and Orthodoxy” (1835) formed part of the religious arguments of the time.White also wrote some now mostly forgotten poetry, but his sonnet, “Night and Death,” orginally dedicated to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, should not be allowed to fade away. More or less Shakespearian in form — three quatrains and a couplet, but rhymed abba abba cdcd ff — the sonnet offers an image of Adam frightened by the disappearance of the sun and the coming of night. Yet that “first parent” then sees the sky filled with twinkling lights, as the Evening Star, Hesperus, “with the host of heaven came, / And lo! Creation widened in man’s view.” If so with the coming of night, why not with the coming of death, White asks in his concluding couplet: “Why do we then shun death with anxious strife? / If Light can thus deceive, wherefore not Life?”Night and Deathby Joseph Blanco WhiteMysterious Night! when our first parent knewThee from report divine, and heard thy name,Did he not tremble for this lovely frame,This glorious canopy of light and blue?Yet ’neath a curtain of translucent dew,Bathed in the rays of the great setting flame,Hesperus with the host of heaven came,And lo! Creation widened in man’s view.Who could have thought such darkness lay concealedWithin thy beams, O Sun! or who could find,Whilst fly and leaf and insect stood revealed,That to such countless orbs thou mad’st us blind!Why do we then shun death with anxious strife?If Light can thus deceive, wherefore not Life?___________________________________________With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.

Poem of the Day: ‘Night and Death’

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