The Night Has A Thousand Eyes
~ by Francis William Bourdillon
The night has a thousand eyes,
And the day but one;
Yet the light of the bright world dies
With the dying sun.
The mind has a thousand eyes,
And the heart but one:
Yet the light of a whole life dies
When love is done.
About the Poem
The beauty of poetry lives in the way that it embraces the context of your life to make your uniqueness into something universal. The stars and dying sun create a powerful metaphor where the last line of the poem delivers a punch to the chest: “the light a whole life dies when love is done.” We can perhaps survive this existence with the many things that entertain our mind, but the heart needs only love. Perhaps the poem is a lament on love lost, perhaps a statement on the power of love. You decide!
Francis William Bourdillon (1852 – 1921) was a Victorian-era English poet who published 13 volumes of poems from 1878 – 1921. “The Night Has a Thousand Eyes” is one of his most commonly recited poems in English. Interestingly, it was originally published in French. The literary magazine, Ailes d’Alouette, published the poem in 1891. Bourdillon then translated the poem back to English where it was published in several anthologies, including The Oxford Book of English Verse (1939) and The Norton Anthology of English Literature (1962).