The End Of The Day - Analysis

A small revolt against Life, not a hymn to bedtime

Baudelaire’s central claim is blunt: what most people call life feels like an exhausting, shameless spectacle, and the day’s end is welcome not because it’s picturesque, but because it finally loosens life’s grip. In all three translations, daytime is figured as something loud, intrusive, almost indecent: noisy, shriek-filled, impudent, even full of treason. Against that racket, the poet greets night with a private exhale—At last!—as if darkness were the only honest mercy available.

Daylight as harassment: dancing without reason

The poem’s daytime isn’t productive or meaningful; it runs and dances and twists capriciously for no good reason. That phrase matters: it’s not that life is hard because it’s purposeful, but hard because it is senselessly busy. Even the light itself is sickly—pallid, sallow, wan, dejected—so the world is drained before night even arrives. The tone here is disgusted and fatigued at once: the speaker doesn’t merely feel tired; he feels insulted by the daytime’s impudent performance.

The hinge: when voluptuous night starts to erase

The poem turns the moment night rises or climbs the horizon. It’s described as voluptuous or sensual, which is an unexpectedly bodily word for what’s basically darkness. Night doesn’t only soothe; it actively cancels: assuaging and hushing even hunger, effacing even shame. Those evens widen the promise. If night can quiet hunger (the body’s bluntest demand) and erase shame (the conscience’s rawest sting), then it isn’t just a backdrop for rest—it’s an agent of oblivion. The relief is real, but it comes with a cost: what makes night tender is also what makes it dangerous, because it comforts by wiping things out.

The body speaks: spirit reduced to a spine

When the poet speaks to himself, the language collapses the spiritual into the skeletal: My spirit is like my vertebrae or like my bones, pleading for repose. This is a grimly physical metaphor—spirit as something with joints that ache. Rest isn’t framed as a choice or a virtue; it’s a demand issued by a worn-out frame. Meanwhile the heart is not uplifted by night; it is full of gloomy or melancholy dreams, even sad dreams invade it. So the poem refuses a simple contrast where day is bad and night is good. Night is welcomed as relief, but the inner weather remains heavy; darkness doesn’t cure the speaker, it simply gives him a place to fold up.

Those curtains: bed, theatre, and something like a shroud

The ending image is intimate and strange: I shall lie down flat on my back and wrap myself or roll myself into night’s curtains. Curtains belong to bedrooms, but they also belong to stages and sickrooms, and they can feel uncomfortably close to burial cloth. Calling darkness refreshing or restoring makes it sound medicinal; calling it a curtain makes it sound like the closing of a show. This double sense sharpens the poem’s central tension: the poet craves rest, yet the form of rest he imagines is a full enclosure—dense, black, and total. He doesn’t drift into sleep; he coils into it.

The sharpest discomfort: if night erases even shame, what else should vanish?

The poem invites a slightly alarming question. If the best promise of night is that it effaces even shame, then the poet is asking not only for sleep but for moral silence—an end to self-judgment. When he says At last!, it can sound like gratitude, but it can also sound like surrender: relief purchased by disappearance.