Donald Jeffrey Hayes (1904–1991) was a young African American poet of the Harlem Renaissance, and “Nocturne” appeared in Countee Cullen’s landmark 1927 anthology Caroling Dusk. Hayes belonged to a rising Black literary generation that was claiming the full range of lyric traditions, not only folk or protest modes. The collection showcased that ambition, and Hayes stood out for his delicate musical sense. The poem’s context matters because it resists expectation: at a time when many readers looked to African American writers mainly for social urgency, Hayes offered a hushed lullaby that could sit beside any nineteenth-century nocturne, yet still feels deeply his own.
The poem addresses the evening world as if it were a living listener. It opens with a whispered request—“Softly blow lightly / O twilight breeze / Scarcely bend slightly / O silver trees”—asking the landscape to soften as night arrives. That request, repeated again midway, creates the central idea: night is a gentle, healing arrival, not a fearful darkness. The direct address to breeze and trees turns the natural world into a companion, almost a parent, that can be asked to hush. When night “glides slowly down hill ... down stream,” it carries “a myriad star-twinkling dream,” and later it will “spill sleep in your day weary eye.” In Hayes’s vision, night does not erase the world; it gathers the day’s fatigue and replaces it with dreams.
Sound does much of the work. The title “Nocturne” itself promises a musical composition for evening, and Hayes delivers that promise in language. “Softly blow lightly” moves in a falling, rocking pattern that never strains beyond a breath. The recurring pairs of end-rhyme—“breeze” and “trees,” “stream” and “dream,” “eye” and “sky”—are soft and sloping. The speaker’s repeated words, “softly,” “lightly,” “scarcely,” and “slightly,” all live at the edge of audibility, so the poem seems whispered rather than declared. Alliteration keeps the tone gentle from the first line, as the repeated f and l sounds of “softly blow lightly” never break the quiet. Hissing s and liquid l sounds run through “silver trees,” “sleep,” “spill,” and “steals,” hushing the line as it moves. The punctuation also slows the reading: the ellipses in “down hill ... down stream” open pauses like drifting water or the space between breaths.
The shape of the poem acts out its meaning. After the opening four lines, Hayes returns to them almost exactly, as if the poem itself is breathing in a circle. Lullabies depend on such return, and the repetition makes the request feel like a ritual. Then the final lines compress that circle: “Softly blow / Scarcely bend / So ...! / Lullaby....” The language thins and shortens, mimicking the breeze dying away, the trees becoming still, the speaker slipping toward sleep. The word “Lullaby” is not a label but a final breath, leaving the reader in the hush it has created. Meanwhile, Hayes balances the cosmic and the bodily: a “soft yellow moon steals down the sky” for everyone, while the “day weary eye” belongs to a single tired listener. The “myriad star-twinkling dream” is vast, yet it fits inside one closing mind.
What makes “Nocturne” significant is that its form becomes its meaning. The poem does not merely describe sleep; it performs the settling, the repetition, the fade. Within the Harlem Renaissance, it quietly expands the range of Black poetry by claiming the nocturne—an old musical form for night—and turning it into something intimate and universal. Hayes reminds readers that a poem can be a spell, not just a statement. The final “Lullaby....” leaves no argument, only a lingering quiet.