Frank Marshall Davis, an African American poet and journalist, turns the love lyric into a fragile meeting with the night itself. In “Tryst,” the speaker calls the beloved into the “baby hours of morning,” when the moon is “a full grown woman” trailing a platinum veil. The night is not simply a setting but a character: feminine, silvery, dreamlike. The sun, by contrast, is a “boy with a rubber ball,” playful but ordinary, something the speaker wants to postpone. The poem’s central tension appears immediately: an intimate encounter must happen before day arrives to “scourge night from the sky.”
The meeting place is deliberately minimal: “only a pine,” grass with “thin green fingers,” and “small hushed voices of woodfolk.” This is not a bedroom or garden; it is a natural sanctuary where plants have hands and voices. The speaker asks to sense the beloved as “a rolling prairie fire” that eats “into my mind with sharp hot teeth.” Passion here is real but kept inside the mind, not acted out. Immediately after, the poem shifts to tender cosmic fragments: “Moon slivers, sun parings, a basket of ripened dreams.” The imagery mixes cutting and harvesting, as if the lovers’ shared visions are fruit gathered from the edge of night.
The heart of the poem lies in what the speaker forbids: “We shall not speak, you and I, nor let flesh touch flesh.” Instead of consummation, Davis offers restraint as a way of preserving intensity. The “eagle of silence” must not fly away, and the “pot of passion” must not be set to boil. This is not coldness; it is a deliberate holding of desire just short of action, because speech and touch might break the spell. The lovers watch the “slow treading slave night” carry a “burden of a million stars on his black back,” and the speaker suddenly sees the beloved everywhere: as “a star,” “a pine seeking the moon,” “green fingers of grass pointing the way.” The tryst dissolves the boundary between person and landscape, and the word “slave” gives the night’s blackness a heavy historical resonance: blackness bears light rather than emptiness.
Then day breaks violently. The “gray slants of day” scour the sky, and the speaker names the daytime a “fighting man-day” that cannot know “dreams . . . peace . . . rest . . . the silence of night things.” The phrase links daylight to masculinity and conflict, deepening the sense that the speaker values night as a space of peace. The ellipses create small gaps of loss, as if the poem itself is struggling to speak after the beloved has gone. But the last lines turn from loss toward recurrence: other “new baby mornings, moon kissed, star cradled” will come, and the speaker can go because the meeting is not a possession to keep but a cycle to re-enter.
Structurally, the poem is free verse, with no rhyming pattern; its music comes from repeated openings like “we shall” and “I shall,” and from those long ellipses that make the reader pause. The lack of regular meter suits the dream-state the poem describes. What makes “Tryst” significant is that Davis treats romantic longing not as a problem to solve but as a source of vision. The beloved never becomes fully separate from moon, pine, or star; desire remains luminous precisely because it is not seized. The poem argues, quietly, that some meetings are most real when they leave no mark on the day.