[EMLS 3.2 (September, 1997): 2.1-61] The Poetic Nocturne: From Ancient Motif to Renaissance Genre

“Night-walking” for instance is a crime for the medieval commoner (a royal charter of 1347 granted Bristol the right to imprison nightwalkers, for their motivation could only be felonous), but becomes a pious and aesthetic convention for the well-to-do, urban scholar in the century that invented the recreative stroll: as is evident from II Penseroso. Again, we shall see how, in antiquity, sophisticated, metropolitan poets of the Hellenistic and Roman imperial period pen an “aesthetic” refiguring of night, along with other elemental experience, reworking mythological themes within a poised, sceptical climate: precisely as Elizabethan and Stuart writers will confect primitive medieval horrors with self-consciously suave rational superiority into a field of delicate antiquarian whimsy. With the decline of humanistic self-confidence in late antiquity, however, a “vertical imagination” develops, majestically acclaiming the starry spaces in derogation of this puny, sinful earth.