Twilight comes at the wrong time in "So Late the Darkness," and that is the whole point. Daniel Whitehead Hicky sets two evenings side by side: the long, slow dusk of childhood, when night seemed to arrive almost reluctantly, and the hurried, cramped evenings of adulthood, when the dark falls "swiftly" and the day seems to close before it has properly begun. The poem is a meditation on how time feels different at different ages, and on what we trade away when we grow up.
The first stanza makes its case through the senses. Dusk is "the color of purple and scented like wild sweet grapes," a line that blends sight and smell until evening becomes something you could almost taste. The darkness doesn't fall; it "trembled down," a verb that gives it hesitation, as though night itself were shy of ending the day. Even the light has a playful quality, with its "bright escapes" suggesting something slippery that children chase but never quite catch. The opening phrase, "So late, so late," repeats itself like a sigh of wonder, and the poem returns to that echo of longing in its final line, where the lavender light has been "stolen."
The second stanza fills that long daylight with games, and the names Hicky chooses are a small delight: "run sheep run, red light, and devil may care." Children's chants and carefree phrases tumble into the line, and the sentences themselves run on with "and... and... and," mimicking the breathless, linked-together energy of play. The books and pencils "waiting" are the only hint of duty, and they wait patiently. Then comes the stanza's quiet turn: the children "prayed to the God of our childhood that still there was gold in the air." It's a lovely, slightly sad detail. Even as children, they seem to sense that the light might not last, and they bargain for more of it.
The third stanza shifts the poem's tone with a blunt "We are older now, we are wiser." But the praise of wisdom is immediately undercut: it "can never repay us" for what has been lost. Hicky's most striking image here is musical. The passing of the day has "no pause like the breathing in music," meaning no rest, no gentle rest between phrases. Childhood evenings seemed to breathe; adult evenings rush. The dark arrives "on the red heels of the sunset," a vivid, almost chasing image, as if night were treading on the day's feet.
The final stanza brings the argument indoors and makes it small and domestic. The clock "grows ever impatient; it talks with itself on the wall," a nicely eerie personification that turns time into a fretful, muttering presence in the room. The grown-up evening ends not with games in the hedges but with an unsteady climb up the stairs and a bed where people lie "fighting slumber and loneliness, each to each." That phrase is the emotional centre of the poem. They are together, yet each is alone, and the sleep they fight is the same darkness that once seemed so far away.
Formally, the poem uses long, loose lines that roll like speech or song, with a rhythm that stretches out in the childhood stanzas and presses tighter later on. The rhyme is gentle and irregular rather than rigid, with echoes such as "grapes" and "escapes," "air" and "hedges" doing their work quietly. Colour carries the structure too: purple and gold give way to red and finally lavender, a softened, faded shade that suggests memory rather than experience.
What makes the poem worth reading is its honesty about a feeling nearly everyone recognises: that time speeds up as we age, and that the evenings of our youth seem longer than any we have lived since. Hicky doesn't offer a consoling answer. The poem ends on a question, wondering "what power has stolen the lavender light from our years", and leaves it hanging in the dark, which is exactly where its speakers are left too.