The Complaint by Edward Young

First published: 1742-1745

Type of work: Philosophical poetry

Critical Evaluation:

NIGHT THOUGHTS, as it is best known, belongs to the long and rich tradition of Graveyard Poetry which received some of its original impulses or boosts through Sir Richard Steele’s TATLER Number 89 and Milton’s IL PENSEROSO. Steele affirmed that the “proper Delight of Men of Knowledge and Virtue” is “that calm and elegant satisfaction which the vulgar call Melancholy.” Milton had agreed, hailing “divinest Melancholy,” “whose saintly visage” is “O’erlaid with black, staid Wisdom’s hue.” Enough such mortuary poems and prose works existed in the eighteenth century to fill a coffin. The most notable was perhaps Thomas Gray’s ELEGY IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD, written during the years of completion of Young’s masterpiece, with its organ-like roll of gloom and sadness.

All such poems begin in gloom and piety, feed the pose with assumed personal feeling, and subsequently delight in the feeling for its own sake, though ostensibly the purpose is the edification of the soul and spirit.

Edward Young’s NIGHT THOUGHTS was one of the most popular early examples of this school of poetry. His subject was “life, death, and immortality,” as was that of most other such writers. This memento mori, with its near-static concentration on death and dissolution, Young felt to be his masterpiece, and though his reputation was slow in growing, once started as a result of the poem, it continued for a hundred years, mistakenly placing him as one of the great poets in the tradition.

The poem is somewhat autobiographical, such facts being embroidered as theology and purpose, and fecund imagination, suggested and demanded. Young’s first wife, Lady Elizabeth Lee, had died in 1740. The daughter of Lady Elizabeth, the Narcissa of the poem, had died earlier, in 1736, and her husband, the Philander of the poem, had died in 1740. The obvious moral lesson to be drawn from the deaths of these people is strengthened by the introduction of a non-autobiographical character named Lorenzo, a “silken son of pleasure,” whose “fond heart dances while the siren sings.”

The nine “Nights” or Books vary little. The subject is the imminence of death, especially of the young, beautiful, and virtuous, and the triumph over it through Christianity. Young had a Puritanical dislike for wealth and debauchery, and a strong feeling about the dignity, nobility, and importance of man.

This poem is remarkably loose and rambling, even for this type of work. Young could not discipline his imagination, as his comments reveal: “My busy mind perpetually suggests new things; my heart knows not how to refrain from pursuing them. The volume grows upon my hands, till its bulk would defeat its end; new rays of thought dart in upon me, which, like cross lights, confound and perplex each other.” He planned his poem as the opposite of most such works. Instead of using much narrative and tying his moralizings to the story, he uses only brief narrative and, as he said, “the morality arising from it makes the bulk of the poem.” The author could not control his moral reflections.

The result is a poem in which the same thoughts are said over and over. There are, after all, only so many ways a poet can comment on “Life, Death, and Immortality” when there is little action. The consequence is a kind of infatuation with words for their own sake, with reflections which are unduly repetitious, with wordiness and dullness. He says, for example, that man is superb: “How wonderful, is man.” Then repeats himself sixteen lines later: “O what a miracle to man is man.” There are numerous other instances of repeated ideas.

Within the style, however, there are strengths. Young’s fondness for words, for cello-like constructions which roll from the pen and tongue, create some striking sentences. He is especially noteworthy for his apothegms, for his philosophical truisms, which, though they might seem to state more than they actually say, were impressive in his time and are noteworthy even today. Such, for example, are the statements: “Procrastination is the thief of time,” the unoriginal but sententious “Life is war,” and “Today is yesterday returned.”

The value or weakness of the poem must, however, rest on its message, its “philosophy” and theological musings and statements. Generated in hatred of pomp and circumstance, in human presumption, and driven by man’s common lot on earth, the poem sweeps across man’s common lot and common fate, concentrating on the miracle and the misery, the hope and the hopelessness of man. Man is “poor,” “rich,” “abject,” “august,” “complicated,” and “wonderful.” Yet God is infinitely more wonderful, who made man such. The author trembles at the fact that man is both wormlike and godlike. Yet nature insists that the worm shall rise beyond the grave, “night proclaims [the] soul immortal.” Though “all on earth is shadow, all beyond / Is substance.” Though the earth is shaky and trembling. Heaven is “solid” and unchanging.

Young dwells on and catalogues man’s woes: “War, famine, pest, volcano, storm, and fire,/Intestine broils,” and such cataloguing, in him as in other poets, reveals and contains much of his weakness. But it sets the stage for the full coverage of his subject. It is mankind, beset by these troubles, mankind in general, that the poet is concerned with. He mourns for the many millions and for their “common lot,” the “throes on all of woman born.”

The first book outlines the author’s general approach, his reflections on life’s vicissitudes and his hopes, including an effective prayer to the deity who “put to flight/Primeval silence.” The next seven books are addressed to the “silken son of pleasure” Lorenzo, the infidel, whose thoughts and actions will reap him eternal damnation. Young reflects often on the reasons for the infidel’s attitude. In the preface to Book VI he conjectures that probably such people are “supported in their deplorable error by some doubt of their immortality.” He is encouraged in his hope for their eventual salvation by the feeling that “men once thoroughly convinced of their immortality are not far from being Christians.”

Book IX, entitled “The Consolation,” ends the poem in a vision of the last day, of eternity, and of the wonder of God’s creation and plan. This book rises to a rhapsody of hope and affirmation of man’s ultimate triumph that is effective. Night is banished; there is no more darkness. “Joy breaks; shines; triumphs; ’tis eternal day.” Though the soul has experienced a few evils, can it, a worm, a nothing, complain? The soul blends “the two supports of human happiness”: “True taste of life, and constant thought of death!” And “universal midnight! reigns.”

For the modern reader this poem is undoubtedly too morbid, too macabre, too static. Its great popularity fed on the contemporary taste for such morbidity. The importance of the poem rests more on its historical interest as an example of the graveyard school of poetry than on its intrinsic value as a work of art.