The Coming on of Night

Linda Pastan’s “The Coming on of Night” is a short poem about aging and the speaker’s growing awareness of death. Like many of Pastan’s pieces, it takes place in a domestic setting, using imagery that is familiar to everyday people, particularly women. It speaks to universal themes of mortality and the passage of time. The poem makes use of “night” (Line 10) as a metaphor for death and the fire of a stove as a metaphor for life.

Pastan is a poet who is sometimes lauded and sometimes lampooned for writing about moments of an ordinary life. Her work has been criticized as anti-feminist because she often writes from the place of domesticity, upholding a woman’s “traditional” role as mother and home-maker. At the same time, her work has been lauded as feminist because it gives voice to the concerns that most women do not feel free to express, such as their anxieties and fears and their grief and sorrow in the midst of daily living.

Poet Biography

Linda Pastan was born in the 1930s and raised in The Bronx. Her parents were progressive Jews, and also avowed atheists who sent Linda to private schools that focused on teaching ethics, notably using classical myths as parables for morality. Linda began writing while still a college student at Radcliffe and won her first major award, The Dylan Thomas Prize from Mademoiselle, during her senior year. The runner-up for this prize was soon-to-be renowned poet Sylvia Plath.

After college, she got married to a medical student, Ira Pastan. She abandoned her post-graduate studies at Brandeis when her husband was offered a position at Yale. By now they had their first of three children and Linda devoted the next decade of her life to motherhood. After those 10 years absent from publishing, with the encouragement of her husband, Linda began writing again. Soon she was publishing and winning prizes for her work.

A major turning point came during the 1980s when Pastan’s parents passed away, her children left home, and she was in a life-threatening car accident which led her to a life re-evaluation reflected in much of her work since then. In total, she has published 15 books of poetry and won many of poetry’s top honors. These include a Pushcart Prize, the Dylan Thomas Award, the Di Castagnola Award, the Bess Hokin Prize, the Maurice English Award, the Charity Randall Citation, and the 2003 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. She was also a recipient of a Radcliffe College Distinguished Alumnae Award.

Pastan accepted the position of poet laureate of Maryland in 1991 for one four-year term, has been a Maryland Arts Council Fellow, and continues to serve at the Breadloaf Conference for Writers.

Poem Text

Pastan, Linda. “The Coming on of Night.” 2001. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

The first three stanzas of “The Coming on of Night” contain three similes that explain the end of ambition. In the first stanza, the speaker compares the end of ambition to a “faulty / pilot light” (Lines 1-2) that “sputters / and goes out” (Lines 2-3) “and the abstract / spark of hunger with it” (Lines 3-4). In the second stanza, she elaborates on this idea, saying:

when even those whose fiery

eccentricities seemed

inextinguishable have faded into

darkness or been snuffed out (Lines 5-8).

This emphasizes the fact that even those with a strong presence will eventually come to an end. After making clear that the speaker is talking about everyone, she says, “we are left with the peace / of evensong” (Line 10). This is a metaphor for not only the end of the day but also the end of life, yet life is not quite over yet. The poet takes a moment to describe the evening itself, which is a metaphor for old age before death occurs.

While the speaker is enjoying the “peace” (Line 9) of “evensong” (Line 10), she describes “night / coming on” (Lines 10-11) in the midst of what yesterday // was simply afternoon” (Lines 12-13). This signifies that time itself is changing. Yesterday this time of day only brought the “us” of the poem to afternoon, but now it is bringing us towards “evensong” or evening, which is a metaphor for later life. In this way the metaphor is being used in two ways; it is both the end of the day and the end of life. If “yesterday” (Line 12) it was “simply afternoon” (Line 13), then the time signature has two meanings. The metaphor can be literal night but also figuratively only the afternoon of a person’s life. However, at the moment of this poem, the speaker is experiencing both the literal evening and also the figurative evening.

In the last stanza, the speaker ends her first, long sentence and finishes the poem with two shorter sentences: “all the clocks are changed now” (Line 14) indicates that her orientation to time and her feelings about time have changed. In her last sentence, she says more directly what time it is: “It is almost time to feel our way / out of the world” (Lines 15-16). By this she means it is almost time to die.