# A November Night analysis

A November Night — Sara Teasdale (1915)

Teasdale turns a city walk into a dreamlike world of lights, memory, fog, and intimacy.

Full text from [Love Songs (1917): A November Night](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Love_Songs_(1917)/A_November_Night). Public domain in the US (First published in the 1910s; public domain under the project’s US screening policy.).

## Summary

A speaker shares affectionate observations with a quiet companion. Streetlights, a bus, a park, a lake, and a moon become parts of a private enchanted world.

```
There! See the line of lights,
A chain of stars down either side the street—
Why can't you lift the chain and give it to me,
```

As fog arrives, the wished-for solitude becomes beautiful and unsettling.[2]

## Meaning and interpretation

Love changes perception: ordinary public objects become royal, celestial, or fairy-tale images. April is an emotional season the couple carries into November.[2]

```
It is our garden,
All black and blossomless this winter night,
But we bring April with us, you and I;
```

The ending complicates privacy: the beloved remains close while the fog makes the familiar world strange.

## Themes

### Love and perception

Affection changes the scale of the everyday, turning a motor bus into a royal carriage and lamps into stars.

### Light and darkness

```
How cold it is! Even the lights are cold;
They have put shawls of fog around them, see!
```

Wonder gradually becomes uncertainty as light is covered.

### Solitude and estrangement

```
We are alone now in a fleecy world;
Even the stars have gone.
```

The fulfilled wish for privacy also removes familiar points of reference.

## Form and meter

This is an irregular, long-lined lyric with uneven sections and no fixed end-rhyme scheme. Many lines approach pentameter, but conversational variation controls the pace.[3]

Enjambment lets descriptions spill forward like the speaker’s excited talk.

## Literary devices

### Extended metaphor

```
Our royal carriage is a motor bus,
We watch our subjects with a haughty joy.
```

The metaphor remakes public transit as a private coronation.

### Simile

```
Like early flowers in an April meadow,
And I must give them to you, all of them,
```

Thoughts become flowers whose beauty includes their vulnerability to fading.

### Personification

Fog puts shawls around lights and turns weather into an active force that obscures the landscape.

## Historical context

The poem appeared in Teasdale’s Love Songs, published in 1917. Its intimate urban setting and concentrated imagery fit her lyric focus on love and perception.[4]

```
That was our bench the time you said to me
The long new poem—but how different now,
```

Memory overlays the present walk, making the setting both familiar and changed.

## What critics say

> “A November Night is a long poem filled with beautiful and haunting images.”
>
> — [Poem Analysis](https://poemanalysis.com/sara-teasdale/a-november-night/)

> “The majority of the lines are written in pentameter.”
>
> — [Poem Analysis](https://poemanalysis.com/sara-teasdale/a-november-night/)

## Common questions

### What is the meaning?

Love transforms an ordinary night into a magical world, but fog makes fulfilled solitude feel strange.

### What are the themes?

Love, transformed perception, light and darkness, memory, and intimacy versus isolation.

### What form does it use?

It is an irregular lyric with long conversational lines, variable pentameter, and no fixed rhyme scheme.

## References

- [Wikisource](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Love_Songs_(1917)/A_November_Night)

- [Poem Analysis](https://poemanalysis.com/sara-teasdale/a-november-night/)

- [Poem Analysis](https://poemanalysis.com/sara-teasdale/a-november-night/)

- [Wikisource](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Love_Songs_(1917)/A_November_Night)

## Open the editor

Write with this poem’s rhythm in the editor: https://lyriic.com/write