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.