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What images are depicted in Kenyon's "Let Evening Come"?
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"Let Evening Come" by Jane Kenyon presents a series of images depicting the transition from day to night. The poem begins with afternoon light filtering through barn slats, illuminating hay bales. It continues with images of dew on a hoe, stars and a crescent moon, a fox returning to its den, a darkening shed, and ends with a bottle in a ditch and a scoop left in oats, symbolizing the peaceful inevitability of evening.
The first stanza details light coming through the slats in a barn and filling up the space with waning sun, traveling across the items inside while the sun slowly descends. As the poem continues, Kenyon alternates images of animals and of objects as the evening spreads over and throughout them. She details crickets striking up their chirping, a woman knitting, dew falling over the grass and an abandoned hoe, the stars and moon appearing, a fox returning to its den for the night, a shed going dark inside, and finally to a bottle in a ditch and a scoop left in the oats. Kenyon passes through various images of items that are abandoned as evening descends, finishing with the statement that there is no need to fear the fall of evening, because God holds us safe and does not leave us without comfort.
In her beautiful and spare poem that...
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can be read as a meditation on aging,Jane Kenyon creates a handful of images that suggest the closing of day. The first image is of late afternoon light shining through the cracks between boards on the side of a barn. The light travels across hay bales in its journey toward sundown.
The second image Kenyon offers is the moisture of dew collecting on a hoe that has been left in a field of "long grass."
The next images are stars appearing in a night sky and the moon appearing as a crescent beginning to take on fullness.
Kenyon evokes the sight of a fox returning to "its sandy den" and a farm shed becoming filled with blackness as the light of day recedes.
Kenyon offers two last pictures: a bottle in a ditch and a "scoop in the oats" in a barn.