Bowles 7: Evening! as slow thy placid shades descend

The seventh sonnet is not about a named place, but rather a time of day.

Evening! as slow thy placid shades descend,
Veiling with gentlest hush the landscape still,
The lonely battlement, the farthest hill
And wood,—I think of those that have no friend:
Who now, perhaps, by melancholy led,
From the broad blaze of day, where pleasure flaunts,
Retiring, wander ‘mid thy lonely haunts
Unseen; and mark the tints that o’er thy bed
Hang lovely; oft to musing fancy’s eye
Presenting fairy vales, where the tir’d mind
Might rest, beyond the murmurs of mankind,
Nor hear the hourly moans of misery.
Ah! beauteous views, that hope’s fair gleams the while
Should smile like you, and perish as they smile!

I like this better than some of the earlier ones. I like the way the (visible) shadows of evening veil 'with gentlest hush', as if they were physical sheets or curtains; I like the way we can intuit that the speaker is alone, and far from home, by his description of 'the lonely battlement, the farthest hill'. I like the way his contemplation of the solitary individual moving away on some exilic journey ('retiring. wander[ing]') is somehow simultaneously moving across a landscape and moving through time, from the broad blaze of (mid)-day to the evening that is being, here, apostrophised. The fairy vales are a touch twee, I suppose; although the 'murmurs of mankind' redeems tyhe verse-sentence, with its rather lovely alliteration, and its intimations that the noisy crowds of humanity are already so distant, as we move away, that their tumult has become murmurous.

There is something clever here, I think, about the elision of temporal and physical space; the juxtaposition of brightness and darkness, as means of articulating a mood neither wholly positive nor negative, neither entirely sad nor blessed with unalloyed happiness. That's an interesting emotional state, and it's good to read a poem that tries to capture it: the pleasures of melancholy, the positive affect of thinking sad thoughts about the death of hope. The line in the middle:

From the broad blaze of day, where pleasure flaunts

is prosodically and sonically nice: something about the movement from 'f' to 'f', (from/flaunts) via modulating 'b's, 'd's and 'p's. It also, I think, nods towards the famous line from Samson Agonistes (line 80, if you must know)

O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon

hich also cleverly juxtaposes the night of Samson's blindness against the brightness of the daytime.

The final couplet was originally:

Alas for man! that Hope’s fair views the while
Should smile like you, and perish as they smile!

Bowles was right to revise this, I think. The movement to a generic 'man' is a little jarring, giving the personal, even intimate feel of the rest of the poem. Still 'while'/'smile' is a pretty lame rhyme, and Bowles-y wasn't able to improve upon it:

Ah! beauteous views, that hope’s fair gleams the while
Should smile like you, and perish as they smile!

Excising the rather clumsy and emotionally directive 'alas!' improves this couplet; and I prefer a non-capitalised 'hope' as less stiffly Allegorical. Hope is a beautiful prospect, Bowles is saying; and beautiful prospects are at their most lovely at sunset. But the thing with that is: sunset brings the dark, and dark snuffs out the prospect. O dark, dark, dark.