been little read since the mid-nineteenth century. In its own age, Young's nine "Nights" were tremendously popular, both in England and on the Continent, translated not only into French and German but into languages more remote, such as Hungarian. It went through over thirty editions during the century.
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Young's poem struggles, sometimes in interestingly complicated ways, both against the night and with it. Night is definitely objectified and personified (as not in Finch, for instance). A sable goddess, Night in "rayless Majesty, now stretches forth / Her leaden Sceptre o'er a slumb'ring world." It is easy to see that Young's Night is not only derived from traditional iconographical and poetic sources, such as Spenser, but that it or rather
she
is an immediate reflection and in some ways counterpart of Pope's goddess of Dulness (herself, "With Night Primeval," restoring "the great Anarch's ancient reign," strongly related to the iconographic and poetic traditions of personified Night, especially in Spenser). Pope's goddess is a power to be condemned and resisted. The day world of ceaseless striving, clarity of vision, order, hierarchy, and regulation must be assertedand this is a remorselessly masculine world. The power of seeing is the power of control; the night world brings on terrible blindness. Young's poem takes issue, implicitly, with Pope. Not least does it do so in the choice of blank verse, which by this time seems in itself a rejection of the world of day, of authority, reason, and social order. These things, like socially based moralizing, are best left to the daylight operations of rhyme, the satirist's tool.
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As the century progresses, blank verse steadily becomes, not what it was in Milton, the vehicle for high heroic thought and action, but the means of expressing personal sensibility. It is thus associated with what John Sitter calls "Literary Loneliness." Blank verse is often the medium for carrying out what Sitter defines as "feminizing and internalizing" the poetic impulse itself, in the personification of imaginative entities as feminine. Johnson in his poems and Goldsmith in
The Deserted Village
evidently wish to maintain the serious import of rhyme, and to sustain the habit of moral and social observation. But the tendency of what their age called "the age" was against them, leading toward the explosion out of regular form signified by Macpherson's Ossian and all of Blake's later writings, as well as toward the calmer inwardness of Cowper's blank verse in
The Task
. Cowper owes a serious debt to his mid-century predecessor Young, who so importantly called upon the relief of night and darkness, and the personal consciousness. Young's
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