Night by Robert Bly

First published: 1962, in Silence in the Snowy Fields

Type of poem: Lyric

The Poem

“Night,” written in free verse, is a short poem divided into four sections, each of which is four lines long. Like many of Robert Bly’s titles, “Night” appears to be a title without pretense or philosophical complexity; the poem is, however, richer in meaning than the title indicates. Night is a time for dreamlike thought, unmoored from the world of daylight’s reason and logic. Bly’s four sections offer four visions of night’s mysteries.

The poem is written in the first person, but it moves from a particular first-person-singular speaker—Bly himself—to a more generalized first-person plural. By writing in the first-person plural—“we”—the poet takes an enormous risk, because he appears to be speaking for all humanity. When a poet says “I,” the reader must believe the speaker. When a poet says “we,” thereby including the reader in his or her pronouncement, the reader may object to the statement or worldview.

The poem begins with what appears to be an extremely logical “if/then” proposition: “If I think of a horse,” then “I feel a joy.” Bly complicates the logic, however, by appending what appears to be an odd metaphor: If he thinks of a horse he feels joyful, as if he had thought of a pirate ship. The circular movement from thought to joy and then back to thought again is counteracted by the centrifugal force in the logic of the poem that jumps from the horse in a field to a pirate ship surrounded by flowers. The mood of the poem is immediately set by the dreamlike logic of the metaphors and the poem’s eccentric movement.

The second section is typical of Bly’s work: He anthropomorphizes the natural world. The happiness Bly felt in section I becomes so contagious that even the box elder trees “are full of joy.” The magic of night leads to the melting together of normally separate objects: The horse becomes like a ship, and the joy passes from Bly the observer to the observed trees. Because it is night, Bly tries to convince the reader that the lilacs and the plants are sleeping, once again blurring the boundaries between things by anthropomorphizing. The final image is loaded: “Even the wood made into a casket is asleep.” The wood still participates in the natural order, being able to sleep as well as the lilacs, even though it has undergone the transformation from nature’s tree to humans’ wood. The casket is also the final resting place for someone lodging in the realm of eternal sleep.

The third stanza once again melds disparate realms. The butterfly joins earth with air by carrying “loam on his wings,” while the amphibian toad—the bridge between two worlds—joins earth with water by “bearing tiny bits of granite in his skin.” The zone of sleep in section 2 is revisited in the final image of section 3, in which the tree leaves and “bits of earth at its root” are asleep.

The concluding section wakes up the poem with copious movement. If the trees and plants can sleep like humans, why cannot a person be like a “sleek black water beetle./ Skating across still water”? In a “night poem,” the possible metamorphoses are endless. The final change in the poem is perhaps the most startling. In a poem that has been silent, devoid of voices and animal sounds, the final image of a mouth opening, not to speak but to swallow, is arresting. The poem is stopped by death.

Forms and Devices

“Night” is so deceptively simple that a reader might miss the careful structuring in the poem. Generally, there is a falling away or a downward movement in each of the four sections. The first three prepare the reader for the jolt of the final macabre image of death swallowing its victim.

In the first stanza, a scene filled only with moonlight is transformed when Bly imagines a horse “wandering about sleeplessly.” The thought of this horse is immediately replaced by that of the pirate ship, and the horse’s sleeplessness gives way to the sleep-coated trees and plants and flowers in the rest of the poem. The poet proffers one thing, then takes it away. The second stanza drops from the heights of the box elder tree to the lilacs and plants and, finally, into the casket, which might already be in the ground. The third stanza recapitulates this downward movement twice: It begins with a loamy butterfly on the wing and moves downward to a granite-infested toad; it observes the crown of a tree and ends with the “earth at its root.”

This downward movement echoes the thematic transformation from joy to the eeriness of death. The concluding death of the beetle is everyone’s death, which should not come as a complete surprise. Each section tries to warn the reader by establishing this pattern of presence and disappearance, of flight and a final resting place in the earth. Each person is like the beetle skating across the water in seemingly perfect freedom, only to discover that will means nothing in the end. Each person moves from life to death as easily as this night poem shifts from the crowns of trees to the earth around their roots.

Each section of the poem enacts the death of the beetle. The poet’s imagination apparently skates along in any direction it wills, but the form of the poem belies this haphazardness. Each time the poet tries a flight of fancy, the world of death pulls him down. Night is a time when the imagination runs wild, but finally, at least in this poem, the imagination runs back to the ultimate form of night, which is death.

Bibliography

Altieri, Charles F. “Varieties of Immanentist Experience: Robert Bly, Charles Olson, and Frank O’Hara.” In Enlarging the Temple: New Directions in American Poetry During the 1960’s. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1979.

Davis, William Virgil. Understanding Robert Bly. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988.

Friberg, Ingegard. Moving Inward: A Study of Robert Bly’s Poetry. Goteborg, Sweden: Acta University Gothoburgensis, 1977.

Harris, Victoria. The Incorporative Consciousness of Robert Bly. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992.

Lensing, George S., and Ronald Moran, eds. Four Poets and the Emotive Imagination: Robert Bly, James Wright, Louis Simpson, and William Stafford. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976.

Malkoff, Karl. Escape from the Self: A Study in Contemporary American Poetry and Poetics. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977.

Nelson, Howard. Robert Bly: An Introduction to the Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.

Peseroff, Joyce, ed. Robert Bly: When Sleepers Awake. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1985.

Robert Bly Web site. www.Robertbly.com.

Smith, Thomas R. Walking Swiftly: Writings and Images on the Occasion of Robert Bly’s 65th Birthday. New York: Perennial, 1991.

Sugg, Richard P. Robert Bly. Boston: Twayne, 1986.