You, Andrew Marvell

 

 

                                                                           Wilhelm Amberg

You, Andrew Marvell



And here face down beneath the sun

And here upon earth’s noonward height

To feel the always coming on

The always rising of the night:



To feel creep up the curving east

The earthy chill of dusk and slow

Upon those under lands the vast

And ever climbing shadow grow



And strange at Ecbatan the trees

Take leaf by leaf the evening strange

The flooding dark about their knees

The mountains over Persia change



And now at Kermanshah the gate

Dark empty and the withered grass

And through the twilight now the late

Few travelers in the westward pass



And Baghdad darken and the bridge

Across the silent river gone

And through Arabia the edge

Of evening widen and steal on



And deepen on Palmyra’s street

The wheel rut in the ruined stone

And Lebanon fade out and Crete

High through the clouds and overblown



And over Sicily the air

Still flashing with the landward gulls

And loom and slowly disappear

The sails above the shadowy hulls



And Spain go under and the shore

Of Africa the gilded sand

And evening vanish and no more

The low pale light across that land



Nor now the long light on the sea:



And here face downward in the sun

To feel how swift how secretly

The shadow of the night comes on ...



Louis MacNiece

Night poems come in so many forms - symbolic, descriptive, meditations on death or parting (really, I should put together a collection for comparison and contrast). In this one, darkness creeps inexorably over the globe, swallowing cities, whole nations and countries. Deserts and mountains go dark, the clouds fade out, bridges go under, trees disappear leaf by leaf - night becomes almost like a mythological creature, a magical being that transforms the world as we know it into something strange and unfamiliar. A poem that never fails to remind me of the turning earth and the mysterious rhythms we all live within.

 

 *The title refers to the Andrew Marvell poem "To His Coy Mistress" which famously admonishes the reader to make the most of time, and seize opportunity before it's gone.