A. C. Swinburne's "Evening on the Broad" opens with the setting sun. The narrator describes his vantage of the sea, the sky, and the land during this transition between night and day, a period that is at once beautifully "hanging in heavy suspense" yet at times can quickly pass unnoticed, as unchecked as the days and nights that fly by while we are immersed in our studies. He decides that the coming of night is the driving force of this passing time:
As a bird unfledged is the broad-winged night, whose winglets are callow
Yet, but soon with their plumes will she cover her brood from afar,
Cover the brood of her worlds that cumber the skies with their blossom
Thick as the darkness of leaf-shadowed spring is encumbered with flowers.
World upon world is enwound in the bountiful girth of her bosom,
Warm and lustrous with life lovely to look on as ours.
He sees night is the unfledged and broad-winged bird that will soon mature and cover the world, her brood. World upon world are covered with each coming of night that are as "lovely to look on as ours." He realizes that this sunset is only one of an uncountable sum, even though he stands there in what feels like a suspended moment. He continues by addressing the odd stillness he sees, in light of the sunset's transience:
Still is the sunset adrift as a spirit in doubt that dissembles
Still with itself, being sick of division and dimmed by dismay.
He ventures to say that the sunset holds itself still for simply two reasons. One, the sunset is sick of the division of night and day that characterizes its passing, and two, the sunset is dimmed because it is dismayed by the division it represents; but he abruptly changes his mind:
Nay, not so; but with love and delight beyond passion it trembles,
Fearful and fain of the night, lovely with love of the day:
Fain and fearful of rest that is like unto death, and begotten
Out of the womb of the tomb, born of the seed of the grave:
Lovely with shadows of loves that are only not wholly forgotten,
Only not wholly suppressed by the dark as a wreck by the wave.
After checking himself, he elaborates that the sunset's condition reveals a greater complexity about this division. It has a strangely human psychology, full of love, fear, and loss, that focuses on the lovely time it leaves and the deathly rest it enters. Just as the fate of the human life is death, the fate of the sunset is clear--it is now filled with the fading love of the day and will soon be overcome by the onset of the dark.
Questions
1. In this section of the poem, Swinburne poses a great contradiction of human life: time is always passing but we often do not feel it. How does his sunset metaphor point out this phenomenon?
2. Why does Swinburne include the narrator's second-guessing himself with "Nay, not so?"
at as ours?"
4. In the last two lines of this section, Swinburne makes two analogies of the love and the dark that are connected by "only not wholly [verb]" that further pinpoint the state of the sunset. What does this mean in terms of the human context of passing time?
5. In "By the North Sea," Swinburne engenders death, the sun, and the wind as male and the sea and the earth as female. In "Evening on the Broad," we see the male wind again, but now interacting with the female night. What does this say about these two elements, and, on the flipside, about the interaction of the two genders? How about in terms of the passing of time?
Related Material
- Evening on the Broads" — A Shadowless World?
- The Circular Landscape: Confronting Paradox and Imagery in Swinburne's "Evening on the Broads"
- Ease or Desperation in "Evening on the Broads" by A.C. Swinburne
- A Bleak World in Swinburne's "Evening on the Broads"
Last modified 21 March 2008