[The evening darkens over]
The evening darkens over
After a day so bright
The windcapt waves discover
That wild will be the night.
There’s sound of distant thunder.
The latest sea-birds hover
Along the cliff’s sheer height;
As in the memory wander
Last flutterings of delight,
White wings lost on the white.
There’s not a ship in sight;
And as the sun goes under
Thick clouds conspire to cover
The moon that should rise yonder.
Thou art alone, fond lover.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on February 21, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.
“[The evening darkens over]” was collected in Robert Bridges’s The Shorter Poems of Robert Bridges (George Bell & Sons, 1890). About the poem, Clay Daniel, an associate professor of literatures and cultural studies, writes in his essay “Robert Bridges’ ‘The evening darkens over,’ W. H. Auden’s ‘Look, stranger, at this island now’: The Many Links,” published in The Hopkins Quarterly, Vol. 38, Nos. 3/4 (Summer–Fall 2011), “In his first stanza, Bridges’ solitary speaker at sunset is troubled by the disappearance of light and by ‘the windcapt waves’ that ‘discover’ what is not yet there ‘after a day so bright,’ namely, the night that ‘will be’ and the ‘sound of distant thunder.’” He continues, “The speaker in Bridges’ more traditional ‘brooding meditation,’ purportedly recording his perceptions, reflects on what is not there and then concludes with a statement of the immortal theme of an isolated if not disappointed or abandoned individual lover.”
Robert Bridges
Robert Seymour Bridges was born on October 23, 1844, in Walmer, Kent, England. He enrolled in Eton College in 1854 and started writing poetry. In 1863, he enrolled at Corpus Christi College at Oxford University, where he met Gerard Manley Hopkins, who he would remain friends with until Hopkins’s death in 1889. Bridges would also become Hopkins’s literary executor, collecting and editing his friend’s poems for publication after his death.