SOURCE: Hansen, Tom. “Bly's ‘Surprised by Evening.’” Explicator 58, no. 1 (fall 1999): 53-55.

In the following essay, Hansen explicates the allusions and imagery of Bly's poem of otherworldly communion, “Surprised by Evening.”

Robert Bly's book Eating the Honey of Words: New and Selected Poems (1999) contains a number of Bly's best-known poems. Some of the older ones, nearly a half-century old, are as evocative yet as elusive as when they were first published, in part because they are the earliest poems that evidence Bly's career-long fidelity to three things so idiosyncratic, at least in his hands, that they have become trademarks of his poetry: leaping association, the deep image, the transparent style. In most cases, what these poems say is clear. Sentence by sentence, they make sense. But what they mean, what they add up to in the final analysis, is difficult to ascertain, often because there is no final analysis...