Hepaticas and Cornel-buds (Symbols)
In "Evening," the flowers can be viewed as symbols of living beings. The petals of the hepaticas, as the speaker describes, "reach inward" and their "blue tips bend toward the bluer heart" until "the flowers are lost." This process of reaching inward toward the heart may symbolize how people attempt to seek understanding within, or choose to retreat into self-preservation. Nightfall, in its inevitability, mystery, and all-encompassing nature, suggests that the fading flowers operate as symbols of the human experience of loss. The ultimate "loss" of the hepaticas to the darkness could symbolize the loss that results from such a turning inward or a retreat—the loss of clarity, memory, or even one's individuality. Ironically, such a retreat inward could even represent the loss of one's ability to remain in denial; both loss of ignorance and loss of clarity are possible in this conception. Similar to the hepaticas, the cornel-buds are "still white, but shadows dart" and creep around their roots. Therefore, the cornel-buds could function as a parallel symbol of human experience; the darting and creeping shadows representing the anxious, elusive nature of forces that contribute to or catalyze loss. Some examples of such forces that are experienced universally are confusion, death, and repression. The description of the hepaticas as "wide-spread under the light" and the cornel-buds as "still white" serve to illustrate how even the most robust, bright, or vivacious entity is still subject to these inevitable forces of change.
Nightfall (Allegory)
The progression of night falling from the perspective of the flowers (or from an unspecified witness near the flowers) illuminates how even the smallest entities are subject to change from the mysterious and intense influence of the forces of nature. Darkness, in this case, is not only a loss of actual sight come night, but an allegory for the way darkness falls upon all subjects at times—in grief, in death, in forgetting, and, in a metaphorical or psychic sense, during the processes of repression, when thought shifts from perceivable to buried in the mind's recesses.
