[In the following essay, Harris lauds the serenity in the face of an inevitable death, and the calm assurances of solace in Kenyon's poem, “Let Evening Come.”]

Let the light of late afternoon
shine through the chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.
Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.
Let the dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.
Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.
To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.
Let it come, as it will, and don't
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.

In “Let Evening Come”, Kenyon begins with the motion of sunlight, suggesting a balance of upward and downward, rising and falling:

Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.

Sunlight is seen so indirectly, as a belated influence on what has already been nourished by it. From the poet's point of view, the bales no longer initiate sunlight, yet sunlight is so resplendent in the barn it pleases the poet's eye, her pre-existing need for beauty. Sunlight is therefore worthy of praise. We should bear in mind that in this beginning stanza, we, as readers are situated very close up, although the agency of light is as distant as it could be. In the next stanza, there is activity, work, labor that consumes time in the day, as the poet writes:

Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.

The cricket chafes as the woman scrapes the needles of her yarn. All is process, and all is interrelated. The poet is compelled by the last remnants of time before its darkening, when it is transfigured into something else, something yet to be named. Accepting the evening's coming, Kenyon warns us against exhausting ourselves trying to save what can't be saved because it is already subject to mutability. Although darkness will come, and the poet's vision will be eclipsed, the objects themselves remain. There is always something of this world left in any other. Here is an axis of faith:

Let the dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in the long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose its silver horn.

Each stanza in the poem begins with the verb “let,” as if to convey acceptance of the inevitable or to permit in a specified manner, or to release from confinement. But “let” also suggests the idea of leaving something unfinished or undone. The present moment demands the subsequent moment to continue or complete it. With time, Kenyon advises, things (like the juice of the apple) age and transform into a different form or taste; even the body decays and finds its way into dust. In the next two stanzas, Kenyon makes us even more aware of the lassitude of the day's ebbing energies and the need for rest. Rest is essential even if it will only contribute to more labor. “The dew collects on the hoe,” and then every thing accounted for is equally at rest or emptied by loss, light, or lack. Yet in Kenyon's accounting for objects that become empty (“the sandy den,” the wind that retires, the shed that goes black), she also anticipates that which would fill them:

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.
To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.

Between these two stanzas there is a significant change in perspective. From the positioning of the one who yields to something forthcoming, we shift to the object which receives the allotment of some kind of sustenance. The body is filled by the soul as the soul is emptied of the body. In the absence of one, there is the presence of the other. The same is true of the word: it is simultaneously the absence and presence of the thing it signifies. Whether God exists or not, the need for comfort in approaching death makes God necessary to the poem, just as the oats are necessary to the scoop, the den to the fox, and air to the lung. The poet's vision is a synthesizer of things, an interpreter of an otherwise incoherent language that marks itself on both the world and the page.

Like the still life painter, Kenyon persists in finding the rightness of placed things by continuing to arrange and compose objects in space while rendering those objects through the mediation of an art-language. Each object defined and sanctified in nature appears to be the manifestation of the poet's thought, and this thought unifies human thought with God's intention. There is a compositional rightness of things placed in the position in which they were intended.

What Kenyon discovers in closer scrutiny of these objects is their aesthetic quality, that which is not subject to mutability or decay. Yet the poet is ambivalent:—in pursuit of transcendent beauty which would supersede the sensual, she seems unable or unwilling to sacrifice the sensuality that includes the cost of temporal process. Imagination, as Keats maintained, is a prefiguration of the transcendent realm, and our love of sensual beauty in this world is (for the believer) a realm that follows and in which life originates. Evening is always another sudden afterlife, comprised of all the light and darkness that has come before and after it.

“Let Evening Come” is formed by the language of imperative, a poem that urges the reader to pay attention. The speaker is telling herself what she has to do, which is to do nothing, to give up all resistance to what one can't control in language or process. The same is true of the reader who yields to what the writer has placed before him or her. At a certain point, the poem is a fate that encloses the participant within. Indeed, we are watching and listening to Kenyon watching and listening, but to what? It is both her voice, and not her voice. It is the comfort we give ourselves in believing that there is a voice we do not yet know, which nevertheless speaks as God does, and reaches deep from within us.

Kenyon's powers of incantation were a combined achievement of poetry and prayer. One of the marked features of her work is the ordering power of incantation, or repetition, in which details are perfectly noticed. There is survival power in the ability to repeat one's self, a formal power in incantation that sets itself against enormous resistance. The poetic self becomes permeable and is able to pass into the world that might otherwise destroy it.

A poem of unusual reverence, “Let Evening Come” is written in the manner of the psalm, which praises God. In fact, the text resembles the Old Testament psalm, “Lord of the World.” Both praise God's omniscience in the world as a comfort in distressful times; God is important not only to the soul but to the suffering body that, in soul-making, creates the soul: “My soul I give unto his care / Asleep, awake, for He is near, / And with my soul, my body too / God is with me, I have no fear.” Compare these with the closing lines of “Let Evening Come”:

Let it come as it will, and don't
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.

The adjective “so” works here to amplify the factual nature of the assertions made in previous stanzas. Because of the reasons given above (the ordering of apparently arbitrary or disconnected phenomena), the speaker contends there is sufficient proof that God does not leave us without a purpose supportive of our living or our dying. The evening, like the morning, has its own kind of naturalization, its own means of individuation. The same is true of the poet's language now invested in the things of which it is conscious. Attention turns to intention. Language not only acknowledges, but illuminates the mysterious object Kenyon seems to say, let evening come, by fully accepting what will be handed over to it. Objects of the world, first owned and then dispossessed, are sloughed off, as the body is sloughed off by the soul that has been incarnated by it.

In one of Keats' famous letters, he discusses how the poet should use the world as a means of “Soul-Making.” Out of a life of pain and sorrows, one makes a soul. The soul does not so much bear one's sorrow or grief as it is born from sorrow and grief. The soul is what slips through the felt-experience of pain or anguish. It accrues value as the person who suffers begins to give up, piece by piece, attachments to temporal things.

We can assume that Kenyon was familiar with Keats' axiom. Her writing is full of references to both the letters and the poetry. According to Donald Hall, in a letter, Kenyon's study of Keats was painstaking and perennial. He recalls that Kenyon spent two years absorbed in her study of Keats—the poems, the letters, the biographies. “Let Evening Come” captures the essence of Keats' Soul-Making, a process of necessary pain and annihilation, not only informed by sorrow but actually constituted by it.

As is true of Keats' “To Autumn,” Kenyon's sense of natural order in “Let Evening Come” quickens the pace of the drowsed poet who, like Keats' gleaner (the personified Autumn in the ode), reminds us we must gather what has just ripened on the vine. Sometimes, the beauty of natural process overcomes and oversaturates our senses, so much so that we embrace beauty even in the shadow of approaching death. For Kenyon, this perception of beauty sensed in the physical world was both ideal and eternal. Although the poem itself embodies natural process and growth, it also uses its praise of things in language as a means of preserving reverence and meaning.

Within the framework of “Let Evening Come,” the poet's attention is drawn by the things of this world; but it is equally drawn by the nouns that name them. Words will eventually outlast things, merely in the act of the poet's saying them. For it is only the word, or the name, that survives natural process and decay. The poet's word, properly handled, is a ghostly presence that returns even after it has expired, something that mortal bodies cannot do.

Like Keats, Kenyon was well aware of the stages one goes through in leaving earthly attachments behind. In mourning, Freud reminds us that we must give up connections to lost objects and accept substitutes in their place. The only substitute available to the poet, as to the mourner, is more often than not language itself, in which the poet takes refuge. But words are always in some sense without the things they stand for. Appropriately, Hall's long elegy to Kenyon is entitled Without. These poems, for and to Kenyon, become a realm where what is fading is still present; and yet, at the same time, these fading presences are pieces of the evidence of what is always missing, what we are always “without.”

But in the poem “Let Evening Come,” poetic identity and self-division are not the issue—faith is: faith in something solidly beyond the pained self that can in fact support it. “Let Evening Come” is a companion to Keats' “To Autumn,” an ode about acquiescence to and acceptance of death. Both poems bring together oppositional states of fertility and decay. Both poems are about lingering at the last “oozings” of the cider press, hours by hours. But Kenyon's voice helps her to listen to the words that console her, the words that persuade her of God's nearness even in moments of self-desertion. Keats' consolation was not part of the immediate drama of the poem, but rather underneath the scenic display of autumnal activities.

Kenyon's cyclical return to the essence of the word “evening” as something that will come not once but for eternity, enclosing within itself all of the evenings that have come and gone, at last gives her a sense of rightness and equilibrium. All things will come in time; the fruit falls propitiously, when it ripens. This is ultimately the rightness of placed things, when the poet knows there is nothing to be gained from moving them into yet another position. No one will miss the simple but profound meaning of this psalm-like poem, no one will fail to miss the message of comfort Kenyon so eloquently inspirited within it.

For consolation, Kenyon sought in the origins of language itself the possibility of God's support. This is nowhere more evident than in the poem, “Let Evening Come.” In Kenyon's work, we can and do hope for something more than a physical existence in the world. “God does not leave us comfortless” writes Kenyon, not God would not or will not leave us comfortless. This simple verb, the “non-conditional,” may well persuade us that Kenyon herself was eventually consoled by her voice and her vision. She would have to align herself, as she saw Keats did, with those powers through which she affirmed her life as part of an ongoing process of Soul-Making.