When the love is gone

My first language poem is The Night Has a Thousand Eyes by Francis William Bourdillon, which can be found on page 953 of the Norton.

It took me more than one read-through to see what this poem was actually talking about. Even though it is fairly short and simple in structure, it is easy to let the comparisons bounce right off of you. The layered metaphors and clever observations make the poem rich and interesting.

The first stanza compares eyes to light. The "thousand eyes" of the night denotes the stars and the one eye of the day is the sun. It points out that though there are thousands of lights in the sky at night, it is only considered light outside when the one light of the sun is out during the day time. This examines the ironic consequence some things have over others, which comes up again in the second stanza.

Here the comparison of "eyes" is less clear than in the first stanza. The idea of an eye does not have an obvious correlation in the mind or heart, but the real comparison is to metaphor made in the first stanza. The reader is supposed to draw on that to understand what is being said here. Basically, what it says is that the mind has reason and the ability to think about many things and the heart has just one focus, love. Despite this, much like the stars and sun, the "light", the purpose, the joy, of a life goes away when the singular love of the heart is absent.