Summary
"Evening" is a short poem of two stanzas—simple in its setting, phrasing, and diction, but complex in its metaphysical significance. When the poem begins, the reader catches a glimpse of the leaves and flowers changing as the light dims; the setting sun passes "from ridge to ridge, from flower to flower." Then, the speaker zooms in on the hepaticas specifically, observing their individual fate as the light is lost. She notes that when the light diminishes, the wide-spread petals of the hepaticas fold inward, rendering them more bud-like than flower-like. "The flowers are lost," she writes. In the second stanza, a shift takes place, and the speaker highlights the frenzy around concealment and loss. The "shadows dart," "black creeps from root to root," "each leaf cuts another leaf," "and "shadow seeks shadow." The poem ends with the phrase "both leaf and leaf-shadow are lost."
Analysis
Throughout "Evening," the speaker personifies the shadows, leaves, and light to make nightfall into an allegory for a human experience. In the most general sense, "Evening" unfolds as a reminder that all living things must bend and bear the weight of the inevitable. Humans, more specifically, must do so while still holding on to their concrete reality and their will to live. This discrepancy between nature's silent bearing of the inevitable, and the ambivalent reckoning of the human witness, gives the poem its bittersweet tone. As the speaker brings the shadows, leaves, and grass alive, the universal experience of darkness (and night falling) becomes personal. Additionally, the quietness of the poem, and its balance of minutiae and philosophical grandeur, create a whimsical feeling that both distances and invites. Though the speaker brings the reader in while describing a familiar visual scene, she then shakes him or her with the weight of its existential implications. "Evening" ends poignantly, like the first stanza, on the word "lost." Perhaps—having no choice in our subjection to time and nature's cycles—we will always, in some sense, feel lost.
The beginning of the poem is slow in its pace, and yet the repetition of the words "ridge" and "flower" provides a sense of austere inevitability and movement. This movement, in turn, seems to invoke a deeper or more spiritual movement underlying the natural changes taking place in the flowers. Phrases like "shadow seeks shadow," "the petals reach inward," and "the blue tips bend / toward the bluer heart" evoke a sense of longing, protectiveness, and mystery that are central to the experience of subjectivity.
At the end of the first stanza, the speaker asserts that the "flowers are lost." This line highlights the assumption on the part of the speaker that with concealment comes loss. This assumption, paired with the phrase "the petals reach inward...toward the bluer heart," implies that as concealment brings loss, the loss is experienced internally. In particular, the word "heart" insinuates that the flower's loss, or the witness' loss of the flower, symbolizes a greater human loss. Therefore, as dusk falls, the flower's folding inward may allude to the various forms of loss that people endure inside themselves: perhaps loss of control, clarity, memory, reality, or access to thoughts and feelings that are deep within. One could also observe that the petals "reach inward"—the word "reach" indicating some desire or struggle to access something inside. Perhaps the flowers' turning inward becomes an allegory for the way people, finding themselves alone and at nature's mercy, search within themselves for sense, meaning, and comfort.
Around the theme of turning inward, "Evening" contains both oblique and overt allusions to a psychoanalytic conception of the unconscious mind—a frequent subtext in H.D.'s work. One could think of the flowers as representing the process of transition from light (clarity) to dark (oblivion) that comes with the process of repression or forgetting. Alternatively, the words "reach inward" could imply that as the outside world becomes indecipherable, the subject must seek clarity within. In this conception, the flower folding up actually represents the way we long to access or reach our repressed thoughts and our "roots." In other words, the poem plays with the tension of wanting to bury things, as well as unearth them.
In the second stanza, the slowness from the previous stanza succumbs to the latent momentum, and a sense of urgency emerges. The "shadows dart," "black creeps from root to root," "each leaf cuts another leaf," "and "shadow seeks shadow." Intention, intensity, and activity permeate these phrases and a frenetic dissonance between the imagery of roots and rootedness, and the imagery of chaos and disintegration, dominates the rest of the poem. Roots, which are grounded, sturdy, life-giving, and connected, are subjected to the unpredictable shadows that "dart" and "creep." While a purposeful propulsion toward darkness and entropy emerges ("each leaf cuts another leaf" and "shadow seek shadow"), one might note that as the leaves and flowers lose visibility, the roots exist as they always have: concealed but instrumental. Perhaps this contrast of the outside and the inside alludes to the way that as life constitutes us, we move and change—even shedding our leaves or flowers to survive—and yet, we can never change our roots.
As activity churns beneath the surface, time passes and life unfolds. Like the hepaticas, we reach and receive, unmoored and driven by forces we cannot control. Worth noting is that at the poem's end, both "leaf" and "leaf-shadow" are lost. Perhaps these lines gesture to the way that often both the things we seek to protect or conceal, as well as the act of concealment itself, slip out of our awareness, and we succumb to life's cyclical torrent.
