Break of Day

The poem pivots on the movement from night to day. The poem develops a dynamic in which both temporal moments become symbolic. The night represents cozy intimacy, the delectable promise of lovemaking, and the feel of secret and protected privacy. But moonlight proves an illusion. The break of dawn, the sudden introduction of hard sunlight, which obviously cannot be stopped, shatters that intimacy and that privacy.

With sunlight the man knows it is time to leave, that the night-world of their lovemaking was never meant to endure, never meant to last. For the man, sunlight symbolizes real-time, real-world complications, the inevitable call to duty, the dreary need to be about the dreary business of another dreary day. “Must business thee from hence remove?” (Line 13), the woman asks. The tone is uncertain—she may be hurt, or angry, or perhaps stunned. Thus, for the woman sunlight represents that hard epiphany, that moment when she realizes her lover intends to depart, intends to refuse her offer to show the sun what they showed the moon, the intensity of their passion. For her, the sunlight represents an illumination of a much different kind.