Speech to the Young: Speech to the Progress-Toward (Among them Nora and Henry III)

As the first of the title indicates, a critical theme of the poem is young people. The speaker sketches a portrait of young people as wild, uproarious, and somewhat reckless. The theme plays on youthful archetypes and how young people are typecast. Not all young people are at odds with harmony or feel the need to rebel against a commanding authority like the sun. Yet the theme of youth links to, for better or worse, the standard portrait of youth manifested throughout literature and media, from Brooks’s flippant young pool players in “We Real Cool” to Bret Easton Ellis's sinister novel Less Than Zero (1985) to the sensationalized teen narratives in the HBO TV series Euphoria (2019).

The daring and destructive theme of young people connects to the theme of night. In a sense, these two themes complement each other, with youth representing night and night representing youth. The speaker wants the speech-giver to tell the young audience, “It cannot always be night” (Line 7). This statement confirms the link between night and youth. Night is as wild and dangerous as young people and vice-versa. The alliance between young people and night is also confirmed earlier in Line 3 when the speaker refers to young people as “sun-slappers.