“Learn to reverence the night,” Henry Beston counseled in The Outermost House. Gazing at the night sky we are touched by an “awareness of the mystery of being,” he wrote.
William Blake had warned, “We are led to believe a lie when we see not through the eye that was born in a night to perish in a night.”
To both men something religious was at stake. To Beston, it was “a religious emotion, a poetic mood, which gives depth to the adventure of humanity.” In Blake’s poem, when the eye was born in the night “the soul slept in beams of light.” And now it doesn’t.
We have banished the night. That was Beston’s lament. And waves in a storm, washed The Outermost House into the sea.
What I think both men saw in the night is that, in spite of the great enlightenment, a certain darkness still covers the face of the deep.
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May 15, 2009 at 2:10 am
stbenedict
Ken, this is terrific. We have indeed banished the night (thanks, Enlightenment…). Berry also saw it, and he realized that life lives and is created in the dark as well as the light:
To Know the Dark:
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
And find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
And is travelled by dark feet and dark wings.
May 15, 2009 at 2:37 am
Ken
Thank you. Berry’s verse is so beautiful.