Every Day Hath Its Night - Analysis

Introduction

Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem presents a reflective, elegiac meditation on the interplay of opposites: day and night, joy and sorrow, bloom and decay. The tone is resigned but consoling, marked by a repeated lamenting refrain “Ah! welaway!” that both sorrowfully accepts and gently consoles. Mood shifts are subtle: images move from stark contrasts to a tempered hope that weeps “in hope.”

Historical and Authorial Context

Tennyson, a leading Victorian poet, often grappled with loss, faith, and change in an era of social and scientific upheaval. Familiar personal losses (such as friends and contemporaries) and broader anxieties about progress and faith inform the poem’s preoccupation with impermanence and consolation.

Main Theme: The Unity of Opposites

The poem develops the theme that opposites are inseparable: each day contains night, calm contains storm, joy contains sorrow. Repetitions like “Every day hath its night: / Every night its morn” and statements such as “Joy is Sorrow’s brother” assert that pleasure and pain are entwined rather than mutually exclusive.

Main Theme: Change and Transience

Seasons and winged hours emphasize flux: “Seasons flower and fade” and “Wingèd hours are borne.” The poem treats time as a carrier of both beauty and loss, framing change as inevitable and universal rather than exceptional.

Main Theme: Consolation through Shared Sorrow

Rather than denying grief, the speaker offers consolation that arises from shared experience and hope: communal gestures like laughing that resembles mirth but contains pain, and the closing injunction to “weep, in hope” suggest a consolatory ethics—accept sorrow because it situates us among others and opens toward hope.

Imagery and Symbolism

Recurring images—the contrast of dark/bright, larks and culvers (doves), seasons—operate symbolically. Larks singing in heaven’s cope juxtaposed with mourning doves evokes transcendence and earthly grief together, implying that sorrow and praise coexist. The refrain “Ah! welaway!” functions as a symbolic breath: a communal, almost liturgical acknowledgement of sorrow that binds the stanzas.

Ambiguity and Open Question

The poem leaves open whether hope ultimately transcends sorrow or simply reframes it. Is the final “Let us weep, in hope” a call to active consolation or a resigned acceptance that hope must coexist with lament? The ambiguity invites readers to locate their own balance between acceptance and aspiration.

Conclusion

Tennyson’s short lyric compresses a philosophy of mutable existence: opposites interpenetrate, change is constant, and consolation is found not in denial but in communal acceptance and guarded hope. The poem’s refrain and paired images unify its message that sorrow and joy are perpetual companions, making endurance itself a form of wisdom.