Ultima Thule: Night
Ultima Thule: Night - meaning Summary
Night Unveils the Ideal
Longfellow’s poem describes night as a cleansing pause that dissolves daily noise, cares, and superficial records of life. As the landscape and its “phantoms” fade, the speaker suggests ordinary, trivial incidents are erased like writing on a palimpsest, allowing a truer, hidden ideal to re-emerge. The piece reflects a late-life yearning for deeper meaning and spiritual renewal beneath everyday distractions.
Read Complete AnalysesInto the darkness and the hush of night Slowly the landscape sinks, and fades away, And with it fade the phantoms of the day, The ghosts of men and things, that haunt the light, The crowd, the clamor, the pursuit, the flight, The unprofitable splendor and display, The agitations, and the cares that prey Upon our hearts, all vanish out of sight. The better life begins; the world no more Molests us; all its records we erase From the dull commonplace book of our lives, That like a palimpsest is written o'er With trivial incidents of time and place, And lo! the ideal, hidden beneath, revives.
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