A farm near Uppsala, Sweden, late July: night deepens over the grassy lawn, the hunching brambles, the river gone pale gray with glints of black. Unable to sleep, nineteen-year-old Elisabeth Christina leaves her bedroom and pads with bare feet downstairs and through the large farmhouse dining room where her family ate supper hours ago. When she opens the door at the back of the house, the wind off the river pushes her nightclothes against her stomach. Cold grass underfoot, flowers wavering in the wind. Perhaps she escapes the house that night for sensual reasons, hoping for something to happen. Something happens. In the location in the garden where she knows the orange petals of the Tropaeolum majus to be, several flower-sized fires sparkle and flare. Perhaps Elisabeth Christina runs inside to wake her father, Carolus Linnaeus, the botanist famous for devising the classification system we still use to name plants. Or perhaps Elisabeth Christina kneels by herself in front of the flower flame. Not hot fire but a trick of phosphorescence, she will explain when she publishes in 1762 a paper on her discovery: the Tropaeolum majus, commonly known as the nasturtium, glows in the dark.
Across the Atlantic decades later, as botanical and horticultural texts proliferated in nineteenth-century America, so did reports of the nasturtium’s nocturnal magic. Hermon Bourne writes in The Florist’s Manual (1833): “This curious plant is said to possess the extraordinary property of emitting flashes of light in the dark. It exhibits an appearance not unlike the gleam of distant lightning. It is often so bright as to render the plant itself entirely visible.” In his nasturtium entry in The American Flora, or History of Plants and Wild Flowers (1855), Asa B. Strong writes: “Darkness flies at your approach. In the darkness of mid-summer’s night, it is said, that the electrical sparks may be seen emanating from the flowers of this plant.”
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As an adult, the poet Emily Dickinson began gardening in the dark—before dawn, at twilight, or even at night—when she suffered an eye condition that made it painful for her to be outside in sunlight. According to scholar Judith Farr, “Her neighbors recalled glimpsing a white figure, slightly illumined by lantern light, kneeling in the darkness above her lobelia and sweet sultans.” What began as a medical necessity became a preference, so that when her eyes improved, Dickinson continued to dig, prune, weed, water, and sow in the dark. “We grow accustomed to the Dark— / When Light is put away—,” she writes, and later, in the same poem:
Either the Darkness alters—
Or something in the sight
Adjusts itself to Midnight—
And Life steps almost straight.
Darkness suffuses the movie of Dickinson’s life, A Quiet Passion (2016), flickering through the sitting room where Dickinson and her family occupy themselves with solitary pursuits—sewing, reading, sleepily treading into the “larger—Darknesses—Those Evenings of the Brain—[.]” In another scene, a wide-eyed Dickinson asks her father for permission, which he grants, to write poems at night. This is the kind of request a child makes of her parent after she’s already begun to do the thing requested, already begun to slip out of her bed after the family is asleep and pad with bare feet to her small writing table. If, on those nights, Dickinson eschewed the table for the door at the back of the house and with “Uncertain step / For newness of the night—” stepped outside with a lantern in her hand, she was still practicing a poetics. The “work of poetry is to counter the oblivion of darkness” writes Susan Stewart. Darkness flies at your approach. In this way the nasturtium is the work of poetry, gardening by lantern light is the work of poetry, stepping out of your father’s house at night in your nightclothes is the work of poetry.
Mary Ruefle: “I am convinced that the first lyric poem was written at night.”
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I use the term night poetics to think about what happens in the night that cannot happen in the day, with a specific attention to those sensual relationships to the natural world that the night cultivates. Small spots of light, which I think of as metonyms for poetry, mediate many of these relationships to the darkness and are often born out of it. Stewart again: “When we express our existence in language … we literally bring light into the inarticulate world that is the night of preconsciousness and suffering.” Stewart’s metaphorical night cleaves closely to the darkness of the literal night, especially the nonurban night in which and of which nineteenth-century writers wrote. While this literary attention appears most publicly in Henry David Thoreau and Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s essays, which their race, gender, and privilege permitted them to publish with relative ease, these men are two stars in a larger nineteenth-century constellation that includes Emily Dickinson and the tellers of ghost stories. These less public voices, in most cases, chose night for the same reasons they chose poetry or the ghost story—because they were places for secrecy and transgressive desire. They bound their fears and desires into small books and placed them inside a box, or whispered them around a fire.
Because the nineteenth century, which saw the advent of electricity and rapid industrialization, marked the beginning of the end of the American night, these texts and traces of texts are remnants of an unrecoverable time but also, I want to point out, an unrecoverable place. I would be overlooking the safety, comfort, health, and social welfare of many vulnerable people were I to indulge in a nostalgia that says that old nights were more beautiful, and therefore better, than our present ones. I am more interested in noting that we, as humans with secret desires, used to have a physical place to seek them that we no longer have. The night, which I am thinking of in this essay as an environment, like a wetland or prairie, is being gradually eradicated in America, as in the rest of the world, by electricity and all that it illuminates. For beneficial or destructive ends, our secrets are increasingly public, shared on the Internet that never sleeps, glowing on screens long into the yellow light-polluted night.
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I first encountered the word o’nights in a passage in Thoreau’s journal. Obscure and expressionistic, the word arrested me in part because of its weird contraction, which we most commonly encounter in the word o’clock. I assumed that o’nights was a word that delineated time and translated it for myself as something like of the nights, letting it rest that way in my mind for years. O’nights. Even without looking up the word in the dictionary I could tell that it described not just one but multiple nights, as if there were a range of experiences that the night proffered or, more likely, a range of nights to experience. In the nineteenth century and earlier, those nights could only have been encountered sensually, with cold grass underfoot, the wind from the river pushing against your nightclothes, the sweet stinging of pines in your nose, the song of the whip-poor-will in your ears, and the taste of nasturtium petals in your mouth.
The word, according to Oxford, means at nights. Use of the word declines throughout the nineteenth century so that now, as I write this essay, Microsoft Word leaves a red ripple under the word to let me know that it is obscure and possibly wrong. Not alone among environmentally minded literary critics who draw attention to the relationships between language and place, Robert Macfarlane argues that the loss of the ecological signifier forecasts the loss of attention to the signified, which is a kind of loss of the signified itself. Macfarlane discovers that the most recent edition of The Oxford Junior Dictionary does not include words such as acorn, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter, pasture, and willow. Without the words to recognize the fern and the pasture, perhaps my children will turn away from them, leave them unseen, which is a way of allowing them to vanish. In the places of the effaced flora and fauna in the Oxford Junior Dictionary are the new additions of our digital era: attachment, blog, broadband, bullet-point, celebrity, chatroom, cut-and-paste, and voice mail. It is not hard to imagine the twenty-first-century child waking up in the night and padding with bare feet to her computer, forgoing the darkness outside to search the bright Internet with her fingertips. Dickinson, in a letter: “How do you sleep o nights—and is your appetite waning?”
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In her late poem “[Those—dying then,]” Dickinson describes losing faith in the certainty of a place with God after death and concludes that a capricious natural source of light offers a serviceable substitute: “Better an ignis fatuus / Than no illume at all –[.]” Ignis fatuus (foolish fire) is the Latin name for the will-o’-the-wisp, the greenish light that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travelers reportedly glimpsed flickering in wetlands and followed at their peril. It is said that over the course of her life Dickinson increasingly chose gardening over churchgoing and, before her death, requested that her coffin be carried through the flower garden she tended at night, an indication that her particular ignis fatuus may have resided there. When Dickinson (earnestly, I believe) offers the ignis fatuus as an alternative to Christian belief, she communicates not only the extent of her religious crisis, but also the fact that in that religious crisis, she might locate a religious experience outdoors, at night. Dickinson’s belief in the natural world echoes Thoreau’s declaration: “Unto a life which I call natural I would gladly follow even a will-o’-the-wisp through bogs and sloughs unimaginable.”
Thoreau’s encounter with a will-o’-the-wisp occurs on an expedition in the Maine woods one night while his fellow travelers are asleep. He slips out of his blankets with the intention of stoking a low campfire and spies on a piece of firewood an “elliptical ring of light[.]” An investigation with his knife reveals a ring of sap under the bark, “all aglow along the log,” whittled chips of which “lit up the inside of my hand, revealing the lines and wrinkles, and appearing exactly like coals of fire raised to a white heat.” The encounter prompts Thoreau to marvel: “I little thought that there was such light shining in the darkness of the wilderness for me. … It made a believer of me more than before.” A believer in what? Not in science, which he disparages in the same passage, and not in Christianity, which he disparages all the time. The will-o’-the-wisp, as he learns from his Native guide Joseph Polis to call the phenomenon, makes him a believer in the poetry that the natural world offers at night. (“[I]f I can show men that there is some beauty awake while they are asleep, —if I add to the domains of poetry,” he hopes in another essay, titled “Night and the Moonlight.”) Thoreau kept the chips, splintered relics, and the following night tried to make them glow again. They did not.
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It wasn’t until the middle of the nineteenth century that the word jack-o’-lantern came to signify a hollowed-out pumpkin with a candle inside it. So while later renditions of Washington Irving’s ghost story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820) feature a headless horseman who carries a jack-o’-lantern under his arm as he gallops through the woods at night, it surprised me to find that the original text does not. I was also surprised to learn that until the middle of the nineteenth century, the word jack-o’-lantern was still used interchangeably with ignis fatuus and will-o’-the-wisp to describe an organic and possibly misleading nighttime glow. Perhaps Irving had the glow in mind when he describes newly arrived schoolteacher Ichabod Crane walking at night through the “spell-bound region” of Sleepy Hollow, when
every sound of nature, at that witching hour, fluttered his excited imagination,—the moan of the whip-poor-will from the hillside, the boding cry of the tree toad, that harbinger of storm, the dreary hooting of the screech owl, or the sudden rustling in the thicket of birds frightened from their roost. The fireflies, too, which sparkled most vividly in the darkest places, now and then startled him, as one of uncommon brightness would stream across his path.
In this sensuous forest, the too-bright firefly, like the will-o’-the-wisp, would have Crane step off the path and into the woods. Crane follows not and, placing his faith outside of nature, sings psalms that his neighbors can hear as he walks home.
The headless horseman pursues Crane one night and, with a hurled head, knocks him off his horse. A shattered pumpkin, a harbinger of the Halloween jack-o’-lantern in later renditions of the story, marks the last place the schoolteacher is seen. While the story hints that a local bully may have masqueraded as the headless horseman to frighten Crane, it fails to explain the headless horseman’s previous exploits, those hauntings that the old-timers share around nighttime fires. What about the original headless horseman, the one who “like a midnight blast” roams Sleepy Hollow o’nights and at dawn races back to the churchyard to reinter his decapitated body? For the headless horseman must be real, is how my friends and I, when we were nine or ten, understood it. How else would a bully know to dress up like him? This was in Sleepy Hollow, New York, the setting for Irving’s story, the real suburban town where I really grew up in the 1980s. Why wouldn’t the headless horseman be real too? On Halloween, the one time of year when I was allowed to leave my house unchaperoned at night, I listened for galloping hooves and looked through the trees for the flickering light of a jack-o’-lantern held high and believed my friends when they said they glimpsed it.
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Thomas Wentworth Higginson: “I detested [my head] more than ever. I thought with envy … of the headless horseman of Sleepy Hollow, of Saint Somebody with his head tucked under his arm.” Essayist, editor, and epistolary favorite of Emily Dickinson, whose poems he published, Higginson desires headlessness on the night that he swims across a brackish river in South Carolina to spy on Confederate forces during the Civil War. Higginson, colonel of the first Union regiment of freedmen, recounts this absurd desire in “A Night in the Water,” an essay he first published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1864 and then, later, in his book Army Life in a Black Regiment. Perhaps he imagines carrying his head underwater for safety. How would that submerged head reckon the watery glimmers that Higginson sees, noticing “where the stars ended the great Southern fireflies began” and the way his body glides within “a halo of phosphorescent sparkles from the soft salt water”? Would it find beauty in further bewilderment, underwater in the darker dark?
Higginson, in a letter to Dickinson after the war: “I have the greatest desire to see you, always feeling that perhaps if I could once take you by the hand I might be something to you; but till then you only enshroud yourself in this fiery mist & I cannot reach you, but only rejoice in the rare sparkles of light.”
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Were they afraid of the dark, and did that fear make them search for any small, even unreliable, beacon? When the moon rose, was it a comfort because it offered light, or was it a sorrow because it reminded them how dark the world was? By they and them I mean anyone who went outdoors at night to seek and sometimes find something there. By sorrow I mean the sorrow that Mary Ruefle locates in the “contrast between the moon and the night sky,” which she interprets as “more conducive to sorrow, which always separates or isolates itself,” and which yields “the isolated sensuality of so much lyric poetry.” On one hand, this sorrow can be kind of romantic, driving the daughter out of bed and out the back door at night, or driving the bachelor to build a small cabin for himself in the woods, or driving the night-writing poet to cry out:
Wild nights—Wild nights!
Were I with thee
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!
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The poem happens at night, when they are alone. The poem happens when she kneels in front of a glowing flower. The poem happens when her fingers reach into the garden dirt, digging not unlike a ghost at daybreak to get back inside a grave, because she is no longer afraid of death. The poem happens at night, when he holds pieces of glowing wood in his hand, and the poem is the glowing wood, the glowing flower, the phosphorescent wavelets, and the weird globe of light over the swamp.
Are they real, the will-o’-the-wisp and the glowing wood? Does the nasturtium sparkle in the dark? One of the charges leveled against nature writing is that mystery is the result of forced ignorance. Consider Thoreau, who, writing about the will-o’-the-wisp, rejects the idea of applying scientific investigation to nocturnal experience: “A scientific explanation, as it is called, would have been altogether out of place there. That is for pale daylight. Science with its retorts would have put me to sleep; it was the opportunity to be ignorant that I improved. It suggested to me that there was something to be seen if one had eyes.”
In point of fact, scientists argued about the source of the will-o’-the-wisp throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The light, as Dickinson imagined it and Thoreau encountered it, is vaguely understood to be the result of the gases released by decomposing organic matter, though just as Thoreau could not make his wood chips glow the night after he found them, contemporary scientists have to this day been unable to replicate a will-o’-the-wisp in a laboratory. Sightings of these flickers are no longer reported, and they remain what one scholar calls “one of the longest unexplained historical natural mysteries.” Because we have clear-cut and drained the woods and wetlands that were the habitat of these lights at an increasingly rapid pace since the middle of the nineteenth century, it is not a stretch to conclude that the will-o’-the-wisp may have disappeared because its habitat disappeared. A corollary: with fewer dark nights to lose ourselves in and fewer places where our smartphones do not have reception, we have fewer opportunities to look for beacons in the natural world. This not-looking can feel like sorrow.
Scientific study enables us to quantify the effects of clear-cutting and wetland drainage, of industrialization and electrification. Poetry enables us to feel and mourn them. There are no longer reports of glowing nasturtiums because the nasturtium does not, in fact, glow in the dark. A German scientist in 1914 proved that “the phenomenon is optical, a result of the way our eyes perceive the flowers’ colors in the twilight.” Even so, it is not wrong to believe in the sensuous. Late at night during slumber parties when I was a child, my friends repeated “Light as a feather, stiff as a board” as I lay down in an imitation of death, and they, after placing their fingertips under my body, lifted me off the ground. The chanting made me weightless: I floated. Though I couldn’t have articulated it then, knowing that I was alive in the world meant knowing I would die, knowledge I first obtained in the night. Now that I am older I can say that is an incomplete and flawed knowledge, as pleasurable as it is sorrowful, as benighted as you would expect it to be. I rely on it nonetheless because I gained it sensually, like the girl who saw the nasturtium glow at twilight and believed, and why should she not, her eyes.