Racism in the Bluest Eye

It would not be an exaggeration to call this poem opaque, though it may seem plain enough. And it would not be an exaggeration either to call this poem plain, though it may seem opaque enough. The poem's structure is plain, an enumeration, far from mechanical, of the life aspects of one night, an idealized night, an archetypal one, that allows for a great multiplicity of life acts associated with it. The precondition, the one precondition for such a night to take place is that this must happen "whilst Tyrant-Man do's sleep".

The opaqueness of the poem is due to the double fact that it is both written in heroic couplets and that it is not a poem of statement; it is a poem that evokes rather than denotes. Even when it seems to be voicing some stance, as happens at the end, it is muted and does not really represent a strong enough reversal as would be expected from a strong conclusion, as in a Shakespearean sonnet for example. The heroic couplets for their part deprive the poem of exhibiting though not necessarily experiencing true turns of thought. In a poem consisting of stanzas separated by white spaces, some transition is indicated by the white space, so that the transition itself can be suggestive of the significance of the stanza within the context of the poem and thus help the forming of an appreciation of the poem.

One needs to look hard therefore for the underlying turns of thought that might lead to a better understating o the springs of the this poem, where it comes from and where it goes to.

Little attention has been given to the title of the poem. The title refers to a reverie which is a state in which one fancifully muses about something, a scene or a memory. The word "nocturnal" suggests either that the reverie takes place by night or that it is simply about night without necessarily happening at night. Alternatively of course, it could be both, happening by night and about night. The ambiguity is just one level of a larger phenomenon.

Another kind of ambiguity has to do with the nature of the night itself. For a night to be so rich a catalogue of detail, it must be idealized and generic, but the title indicates a specific experience of one speaker, that of musing about "a night". The general nature of the idealized night and the individualized musing by the speaker are hard to reconcile at first sight, but the paradox is resolved once we realize that the reverie itself is willed, a matter of choice and that the choice both takes place at the level of sensory experience and at poetic level of choice of detail.

The first phrase in the poem itself, "In such a night" seems to be cut off from an earlier sentence or discourse. One begins by stating that one intends to talk about a night and then proceeds to say something like "in such a night…". Ambiguity therefore permeates the poem from its very title, for the poem seems not to be a statement about night, but a wish for just the experience attending on its presence. This is a difficult moment for someone writing at the turn of the 18th century, an indulgence of some sort that poetic sensibilities of the age could not have allowed.

On another level the poem wavers between tones. At first the poem abounds in natural description of a positive nature, and since it is a reverie, it provides a partial escape from reality into an idealized world. As such we expect the escape to be maintained throughout, but Finch disillusions us at the end by reminding us that it is all short-lived and transitory and that the basic fact of life is the toil, the cares and clamours that are soon to return when day breaks.

The poem therefore revolves around a number of ambiguities. The ambiguity arises from the poet's withholding from developing her reverie into a statement. She insists on evoking rather than rationalizing, insinuating rather than making a direct statement.

The poem is a rich catatlogue of sense perceptions: the senses of seeing, hearing, smelling and touching are all given good space, with more space allowed to the first two senses, since it is through these two senses in particular that our experience of night is formed. verbs like see, show, shew and hear (twice) on the one hand, and epithets indicating perception of scenes and sounds abound in the poem. As one critic observes, sight gives way to hearing, that is the poem has a visual interest at the beginning to the middle and then room is given to sounds and hearing. The poem proceeds from the basic fact about night, that it is a visual phenomenon in the main, and then allows for auditory effects as consequences of this visual reality.

Night versus day

Woman vs. man

Privacy vs publicity

Private writing vs publication

revering as practicing of solitude vs keeping company of others.

introversion vs extroversion