"Written Near a Port on a Dark Evening" is a sonnet written by the English poet and novelist Charlotte Smith, using a description of an ominous nighttime landscape as an extended metaphor for the uncertainty of life itself. Written in roughly 1800, the poem's unidentified speaker observes the ocean at night, listening to the sounds of sailors and watching passing ships. Personification imbues the landscape with portentousness, reflecting the speaker's own worried, thoughtful mood. Despite the personification of inanimate objects, the speaker is solitary, alienated from the other distant human figures and even from his or her own body.
The poem's concluding couplet, following its volta, shifts into a critique of reason as a dominating worldview. It compares reason to both the lights of passing ships and the misleading "fairy fires" of folklore, using a complex series of similes to link the three concepts and arguing that all three are feeble and perhaps deceptive attempts to overcome inevitable uncertainties over the course of life. In its commentary on reason—as well as its exploration of nature's power and its interest in emotion and subjectivity—the poem is a fairly typical work of the Romantic movement.
It is also typical of an English sonnet: the poem has fourteen lines distributed across three quatrains and a couplet. It has an ABAB CDCD EFEF GG rhyme scheme, and is written almost entirely in iambic pentameter. Only its final line, in iambic hexameter, represents a departure from the form.
