Transience
Transience - meaning Summary
Memory of a Vanished Night
Transience presents a speaker who cannot reclaim a night of love and a beloved, using natural images to express loss and the passing of time. The poem juxtaposes a lively nightingale and a sweet, now dead love with autumn rain and damp weather, turning a private longing into a meditation on impermanence. The speaker concedes that what was once joyful cannot be retrieved; the grave of the beloved stands as a final boundary, and the memory of those days remains but cool and distant, shaping a conscience filled with chill.
Read Complete AnalysesLovely night I will never retrieve it, and I won’t see my sweet precious love. And the nightingale’s song, I won’t hear it, happy song that it sang in the grove! That sweet night is now gone irrevocably you can’t tell it: please come back and wait. Autumn weather has now set in locally, with perpetual rains, damp and wet. Fast asleep in the grave is my sweetheart keeping love, as before, in her heart. And however it tries, autumn blizzard cannot wake her from sleep, flesh and blood. So the nightingale’s singing has ended, as the song-bird has taken to flight, and I can’t hear the song now, so splendid, which it sang on that sweet chilly night. Gone and lost are the joyous emotions that I felt in those days and conceived. All I have now is chill in my conscience. What is gone can’t be ever retrieved.
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