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Scripture texts illustrated by general literature

Chapter 60: DAYBREAK NO SOLACE: NIGHTFALL NO RELIEF.
By Francis Jacox
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About This Book

A series of short, reflective essays links scriptural passages to general literature, offering concise secular annotations and meditations keyed to specific verses. Each piece expounds a text's moral or human significance, illustrating themes such as communal responsibility for sin, the diffusion of wrongdoing, providence and chance, the limits of human foresight, and the consolations and warnings of everyday life. The author draws widely on literary, philosophical, and religious examples to illuminate ethical dilemmas, human frailty, and spiritual lessons, frequently balancing practical counsel with interpretive commentary. The arrangement favors accessible, aphoristic observations rather than systematic theology, inviting readers to consider scripture through cultural and literary lenses.

DAYBREAK NO SOLACE: NIGHTFALL NO RELIEF.

Deuteronomy xxviii. 36, 37.

Not the least impressive of the afflictions denounced against a disloyal people, in the book Deuteronomy, is that which should make day and night a fear and a trouble to them; so that in the morning they should say, “Would God it were even!” and at even, “Would God it were morning!” There is at once terrible realism and suggestiveness in words but too familiar to most who have themselves suffered, or watched by the couch of sleepless suffering. Job utters a complaint of wearisome nights as appointed to him; so that when he lay down, he said, “When shall I arise, and the night be gone?” and thus was he full of tossings to and fro unto the dawning of the day. Like the Psalmist, he cried in the daytime, but it seemed that God heard not; and in the night season he was not silent, but it seemed as though from above there was neither voice, nor any to answer, nor any that regarded. In such cases, one day telleth another of seeming desolation; and one night certifieth another almost of despair. And the eventide is longed for in broad daylight, if haply, with mere change, it may bring relief. But when it has set in, and eve has saddened into night, there is wearying for daybreak, as possibly the bringer of a boon that, however, it fails to bring.

A stanza in one of Shakspeare’s poems contains an example to the purpose:—

“Thus ebbs and flows the current of her sorrow,
And time doth weary time with her complaining:
She looks for night, and then she longs for morrow;
And both she thinks too long with her remaining:
Short time seems long in sorrow’s sharp sustaining.
Though woe be heavy, yet it seldom sleeps;
And they that watch, see time how slow it creeps.”

And thus runs one of Landor’s imitations from the Greek, of an address to Hesperus:—

“I have beheld thee in the morning hour,
A solitary star, with thankless eyes,
Ungrateful as I am! who bade thee rise
When sleep all night had wandered from my bower.”

One of, and not the least fearful of, the curses denounced against Byron’s Manfred is, that to him shall Night deny all the quiet of her sky; and the day shall have a sun which shall make him wish it done. Crabbe’s Tale of Edward Shore has to tell how, at one stage of that sombre career,—

“Struck by new terrors, from his friends he fled,
And wept his woes upon a restless bed;
Retiring late, at early hour to rise,
With shrunken features, and with bloodshot eyes;
If sleep one moment closed the dismal view,
Fancy her terrors built upon the true;
And night and day had their alternate woes,
That baffled pleasure, and that mocked repose.”

The hero of one popular prose fiction describes himself as lying awake night after night, quivering with his great sorrow—wishing that the first dull grey of morning would appear at the window; and when it came, longing for night and darkness once more. Of the heroine in another we read that “the terrible ‘demon of the bed,’ that invests our lightest sorrows with such hopeless and crushing anxiety, reigned triumphant over its gentle victim; and yet, when the daylight crept through her uncurtained windows, she shrunk from it, as though in her broken spirit she preferred to hide her distress in the gloom of night, fearful and unrelieved as was its dark dominion.” How sickening, how dark, exclaims Keats, in the fantastic diction of “Endymion,” “the dreadful leisure of weary days, made deeper exquisite by a foreknowledge of unslumbrous night!” Mr. Tennyson pictures to us the simple maid Elaine, who went half the night repeating, Must she die?

“And now to right she turned, and now to left,
And found no ease in turning or in rest”—

like one of those depicted by Keble—

“... who darkling and alone,
Would wish the weary night were gone,
Though dawning morn should only show
The secret of their unknown woe.”

Shelley sings of the desire “of the night for the morrow” when expressing the devotion to something afar from the sphere of our sorrow. Gray vividly depicts the state of mind of one who—

“... starts from short slumbers, and wishes for morning—
To close his dull eyes when he sees it returning.”

Of Mrs. Gaskell’s Jemima we read, that “the night, the sleepless night, was so crowded and haunted by miserable images, that she longed for day; and when day came, with its stinging realities, she wearied and grew sick for the solitude of night.” So with Shenstone’s Jessie:—

“Amid the dreary gloom of night I cry,
When will the morn’s once pleasing scenes return?
Yet what can morn’s returning ray supply,
But foes that triumph, or but friends that mourn?”