Ode to Evening

William Collins wrote his poem Ode to Evening in 1745.

The verse below is from the poem and it has become talismanic to me. I named my body of nocturnal landscape photographs Twilight’s Path after reading it, and I think of it almost every time I’m walking alone in the dark:

Now air is hushed, save where the weak-ey'd bat

With short shrill shriek flits by on leathern wing,

Or where the beetle winds

His small but sullen horn

As oft he rises 'midst the twilight path

Against the pilgrim, borne in heedless hum:

The image of the beetle rising ‘midst the twilight path against the pilgrim borne in heedless hum’ is a striking one. Collins conjures a sense of a person (the pilgrim) who is being carried along in mindless distraction by a kind of constant background noise. Does that image feel familiar? To me it represents the incessant din of media and politics that stands at stark odds with the simplicity of nature as evening descends. 

I find it remarkable to think that as far back as the 1700’s there was recognition of this ‘heedless hum’. What would Collins have made of our modern media culture and, in particular, of social media? There is more heedless hum than ever before as people and institutions splurge opinions and beliefs into the ether which spread and become something equatable with fact. So much trolling, bitching and misinformation which is facilitated by the phone in our hand giving our personal opinions and biases access to potentially millions. So much misuse of the viral rumour-mill by insidious forces who can manipulate whole paradigms of belief. In the last few years it has become quite scarily surreal, and it has occurred to me that we are perhaps entering a technological ‘dark age’ where belief, opinion and superstition carry more weight than facts.

This is why I value so much my excursions into the night world right now. To a large extent it is devoid of humans, and for a few merciful hours the natural world is left to its own devices, quietly going about its processes whilst we slumber in our beds. It is transformed into a wild place where deer and foxes roam without fear. It follows a timeless way of being that gives as much weight to birth and growth as as it does to decay and death. It has no prejudice, no opinion, no belief, no scruples; it just is. My photographs are my own small pilgrimage; each time I wander in the dark forests I feel a reverence for the slow, and quiet force that will continue unrelenting, long after we have gone.

Coincidentally, I can honestly say that every time I’m out in the woods after dark I will always see a beetle on the twilight path and I stop and recite this verse which has come to mean so much to me.