SOURCE: An introducton to Night Thoughts, by Edward Young, edited by Stephen Cornford, Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 1-32.

In the following excerpt Cornford analyzes several themes in, and contexts for, Young's Night Thoughts.

The Grandeur of My Subject

Where is God my maker, who giveth songs in the night?

(Job 35.10)

The invocation to 'Night, sable Goddess' at the outset of The Complaint (1.18) is the sign of Young's sublime search for the secret place of God. Darkness, paradoxically 'aiding Intellectual Light' (IX.2411), will facilitate religious and poetic revelation. Biblically and mystically, Young exchanges Pope's 'clear, unchang'd and Universal Light' for Vaughan's 'deep, but dazling darkness' (An Essay on Criticism, 71; 'The Night', 49). He rejects the lucidity and precision of daylight in favour of night's 'mitigated Lustre' (IX.724). Darkness has 'more divinity' than sunlight, because it 'strikes Thought inward' (V.128-9), it encourages virtue (V.138), and it promotes Christian belief: 'By...