Susan Bradford Eppes begins "Vanished Hours" not with a person but with a place: a full August moon "flooding the World with light" and a forest alive with sound. Only in the last third does the poem reveal what it is really about. Somewhere between the night's beauty and the dream that follows, the poet slips from observing the world to visiting the past, and the poem becomes a small meditation on how memory can give back what time has taken.
The opening stanzas are built almost entirely from sound. Cicadas, a mockingbird, frogs, owls, a fox: the night is crowded with voices, and the poet lets each one speak in turn. Her touches of personification are what make the scene feel domestic rather than wild. The cicada is "frying her fritters", a homely kitchen image for that sizzling hum, and the whip-poor-will ("Poor Will") is "complaining, / For who so unhappy as he?", as if he were a grumbling neighbour. Even the fox's "short, snappy bark" belongs to a creature "seeking his larder to fill", a household errand. Nature here is a community going about its business, which prepares the ground for the human community that appears in the dream.
The star Arcturus, called "the Watchman of the night", seems to "echo 'All is well'", and this is the emotional centre of the first half. The night is not merely beautiful but safe, watched over, complete. The poet admits as much when she says "one could almost wish / The August moon might stay." That wish is quietly important. It is a wish to hold a perfect moment still, and the poem knows it cannot be granted. The very next stanza begins "But already a change was coming."
That change is handled with delicacy. A coolness enters the air, light dims, sounds grow "more distant", and a "fragrance elusive and rare" stirs the senses. Notice how the poem fades its own volume: after all that croaking and hooting, the world recedes into hush, and sleep follows. The scent that puzzles her ("Wondering over the perfume") seems to act as a doorway, though the poem leaves its exact nature unexplained. That vagueness suits the subject, since memories often arrive through a smell before we can say what they are.
Formally, the poem is made of simple quatrains with an alternating pattern in which the second and fourth lines rhyme ("light / night", "tree / he", "hill / fill"), while the first and third lines usually do not. The rhythm is loose and song-like rather than strict, with lines of three or four main stresses that give a gentle, almost spoken lilt. This plainness works in the poem's favour. The tone is that of someone telling a story to friends, and the unforced rhymes keep the sentiment from feeling grand or artificial.
The dream stanzas shift from description to conversation. The imagery turns from animals to "dear friends of old", some "almost forgotten", who hold out a hand. The ordinariness of what follows is touching: "We talked of this, we talked of that, / As friends long parted will." There is no dramatic reunion speech, just the easy drift of talk and old songs and a walk "'mid the flowers." A particularly honest line admits that "many eager questions / Remain unanswered still", a reminder that dreams, unlike life, do not resolve things.
The final couplet-like cry, "Oh Memory, blessed Memory", is the poem's only direct address, and it names the central idea outright: memory is a kind of blessing because it can bring back "our vanished hours". The word "vanished" carries the poem's mixed feeling. The hours are gone, yet the dream suggests they are not entirely lost.
What makes the poem worth reading is the way it links two kinds of fading. The August night, however lovely, must give way to coolness and dark; the friends of the past have likewise slipped away. Yet in both cases something returns, whether the chorus of the night or the voices of old companions. It is a gentle poem, unshowy in its craft, and its strength lies in that quiet movement from a vivid present to a remembered past.