Sonnet

The poem chronicles a constant passing of night into day, and while this highlights the idea of natural cycles, it also adds an element of transience in the heart’s struggle and suggests that, with time, the struggle will fade away. This idea finds express symbolism in the “coming morrow [that] will be clear and bright” (Line 7). Since so much of the heart’s struggle is associated with “dark[ness] and drear[iness]” (Line 3), the “clear and bright” (Line 1) day symbolizes an imminent time when those struggles will be eradicated. The description of the morrow as “clear” (Line 7) also suggests that the sun’s illumination—which has long stood in the Western tradition as a symbol of truth—reveals a reality that has been obscured by a period of darkness.

With this symbolism, Johnson openly engages the Western literary tradition of the “dark night of the soul”; the term originates in 16th-century mystic St. John of the Cross’s poem of the same name, the first verse referring to an “obscure night.” While the “dark night” traditionally describes an individual’s anguished doubt in the existence of God, the term often has the broader sense of a period of an individual’s life during which divine love and mercy appear wholly and abjectly absent (as in the Book of Job). Johnson’s sonnet vividly invokes this despair, and, as in Johnson’s poem, a long-awaited morning is implicit in the narrative of the “dark night.”