Dear Night! this world’s defeat;
The stop to busy fools; care’s check and curb;
The day of spirits; my soul’s calm retreat
Which none disturb!
Christ’s progress, and His prayer-time;
The hours to which high Heaven doth chime.

These lines open Henry Vaughan’s devotional poem “Night,” written in the mid-17th century and published in his religious collection *Silex Scintillans* (1650; expanded 1655). Vaughan (1621–1695), a Welsh poet often grouped with the “metaphysical” writers, turned strongly toward sacred verse during and after the upheavals of the English Civil War. In *Silex Scintillans* he repeatedly treats darkness, silence, and withdrawal from worldly bustle as conditions for prayer and spiritual perception. Here, “Night” is praised not as mere absence of day but as a divinely appointed time for contemplation, echoing Christian traditions of nocturnal prayer and meditation.

Vaughan personifies Night as a holy force that defeats the world’s distractions (“busy fools”) and restrains anxiety (“care’s check and curb”). Night becomes “the day of spirits,” reversing ordinary values: what seems like darkness to the senses is illumination to the soul. The speaker’s “calm retreat” suggests that spiritual clarity requires separation from public noise and self-importance. By calling night “Christ’s progress, and His prayer-time,” Vaughan links the hours of darkness to Christ’s own solitary devotion, implying that the faithful can imitate that rhythm. The final image—heaven “chiming” the hours—casts time itself as liturgical, turning nightly hours into a sacred schedule for inward awakening.