Night, in E. H. Johnson's "Nocturne," is not simply a time of day. She is a creature that wakes, wanders, drinks and goes home again. The poem is eight lines long, yet it contains a complete little journey: a darkness stirs in the forest, travels to a lake, pauses at the water's edge, and withdraws before dawn. What gives the poem its charm is the way that darkness changes shape as we read. It begins as something wild and ends as something almost human.
Look at the first line: "The rustling darkness in the sleepy wood." The word "rustling" is a clever choice, because rustling is a sound, and darkness has no sound of its own. Johnson lets us hear the night by borrowing the noise of leaves and small movements in the undergrowth. The verbs that follow push the idea further. This darkness "glides," "quench[es] its thirst," "studies the tracks where a deer has stood." That last phrase is the most striking in the first stanza. To study tracks is what a hunter or a predator does, patient and attentive, so the night becomes an animal reading the ground. Then comes the "eager burst" across the beach, a sudden dash after all that slow gliding. The rhythm of the stanza mimics this: the first three lines move at an unhurried pace, and the final line, with its abrupt "burst," releases the tension.
The second stanza makes a quiet but remarkable turn. The animal becomes a woman, and the poem signals it with a single capital letter: "Night drinks her fill." Suddenly the darkness has a name, a gender, and a body. Her "blue-black hair" is the sky itself, and the stars that "fall on the lake" are the reflections trembling on the water, or perhaps jewels shaken loose as she bends to drink. The image is double-edged in a pleasing way. We can picture the real lake with starlight scattered across its surface, and at the same time a dark-haired figure stooping over it. Johnson never explains the transformation; he simply trusts the reader to follow it.
The ending completes the picture. "She lingers, dreaming, as the air grows chill" suggests the hour just before morning, when the cold deepens and the night seems to hesitate. Then she gathers "her jewels," meaning the same stars she had let fall, and returns "to her lair." The word "lair" is a lovely last surprise, since it pulls us back to the animal of the opening. Night is both things at once: a goddess with jewels and a creature with a den. The poem circles back on itself, and that circling mirrors the nightly cycle it describes.
The formal structure supports all this. The poem is made of two quatrains rhymed ABAB: "wood / thirst / stood / burst" in the first, "fill / hair / chill / lair" in the second. The alternating rhyme gives a gentle, rocking regularity, like breathing, which suits a poem about sleep and dreaming. The lines are long and flowing, close to a measured, steady beat, and the rhymes arrive without strain. Notice, too, that the second stanza's rhymes are softer, built on the liquid sounds of "fill" and "chill," while the first stanza ends on the hard, quick "burst." The sound slows down just as the night does.
What makes "Nocturne" worth reading is its economy. In so few lines it gives us a landscape, a character, and a small story, and it manages a change of imagery without any awkwardness. The title also rewards attention. A nocturne is traditionally a piece of music evoking the night, and this poem behaves like one: quiet, shimmering, built on mood more than argument. Its central idea is that darkness is not empty or frightening but alive, with appetites, habits and even a certain beauty. Johnson invites us to see the night not as the absence of day, but as a visitor who comes to drink at the lake, shake out her starry hair, and leave before we wake.