Night

Night,
lyric poem by Jeffers, published in Roan Stallion, Tamar, and Other Poems (1925).

In stately free verse, the poet celebrates the beauty of the rhythmic return of night to the California coast. “Sun-lovers” worship a “father of lights and noises, wars, weeping and laugh-ter …,” but nobler night, death, and darkness, “the primal and the latter silences,” must prevail over life, “the flicker of men and moths and the wolf on the hill.” This ultimate truth, which men dared not face before, has been unveiled by modern science and philosophy.