Evening Star
Evening Star - context Summary
Published in 1827
This short lyric, first published in 1827 in Poe’s Tamerlane and Other Poems, contrasts the cold moon with the speaker’s favored Evening Star. The narrator shifts from admiring the moon’s pale, distant light to turning toward the star, which feels emotionally warmer and more inspiring. The poem presents a clear, personal preference through simple celestial imagery and direct address. It represents Poe’s early poetic manner—concise, sentimental, and focused on feeling—rather than the darker Gothic mode he later developed.
Read Complete Analyses’Twas noontide of summer, and midtime of night, and stars, in their orbits, shone pale, through the light of the brighter, cold moon. ’Mid planets her slaves, herself in the Heavens, her beam on the waves. I gazed awhile on her cold smile; Too cold - too cold for me - there passed, as a shroud, a fleecy cloud, and I turned away to thee, proud Evening Star, in thy glory afar and dearer thy beam shall be; For joy to my heart is the proud part thou bearest in Heaven at night, and more I admire thy distant fire, than that colder, lowly light.
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