Night

William Blake

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1789

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Religious Context

Blake’s art is informed by his religious visions and the beliefs they instilled in him. His Christian theology is highly idiosyncratic and rarely aligns with traditional doctrine. One of the underlying threads of Blake’s belief is that one must celebrate all of creation, including Satan. He was obsessed with John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost, which places particular emphasis on Satan’s expulsion from Heaven and eventual role in the fall of humankind. Blake believed that Satan’s uprising against God was justified, and that Satan represents a kind of radical free will and individuality that humanity should strive for. In his other poems, particularly The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake argued that Christianity could not be complete until Christ’s and Satan’s lessons are married into one belief system.

Most Christian sects view innocence as humanity’s default state, or at least its state of creation. Blake sees the progress out of innocence as a good, but ultimately difficult, thing. As part of the Songs of Innocence section of Songs of Innocence and of Experience, however, “Night” takes a different approach. The light of day is typically associated with knowledge—the same force that drove Adam and Eve from their state of innocence. Blake refigures the darkness of night as a state of calm, or a prelapsarian state of ignorant innocence, rather than a state of danger and obfuscation.

Literary Context

Born in 1757, only 13 years after the death of Alexander Pope, Blake grew up in a time that thought English poetry was dead. Poets of the previous generations, including Pope, were believed to have perfected English verse through technical proficiency in classical forms. This emphasis on classical forms continued into the early 1700s and might have contribute to Blake’s relative obscurity among his contemporaries. Blake wrote primarily in irregular forms that bare few resemblances to traditional English verse.

Blake also turned away from the previous generation’s emphasis on technical perfection. Blake preferred to prioritize his complex symbols and images that resisted strict formal confines. Blake’s tendency away from these traditional forms is evident in the stanza lengths and varying meter of “Night” (See: Literary Devices). Since Blake did not follow the mold of poetic excellence, many of his contemporaries considered him a poor poet. Some, however, including early Romantics like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, reveled in Blake’s verse. Blake’s longer and more esoteric works were viewed as signs of mental illness during his lifetime. It was not until the 1960s that American and British scholars began to celebrate and canonize Blake’s contribution to poetry.