Like our shadows,
Our wishes lengthen as our sun declines.

Edward Young (1683–1765), an English poet and Anglican clergyman, is best known for his long devotional poem *The Complaint: or, Night-Thoughts on Life, Death, & Immortality* (commonly *Night Thoughts*), published in the 1740s. The work is a series of meditative “Nights” reflecting on mortality, time, ambition, and spiritual preparation, written in blank verse and shaped by the era’s graveyard and moralizing sensibilities. The line about wishes lengthening as the sun declines belongs to Young’s recurring imagery of day fading into night as a figure for aging and the approach of death, contrasting worldly desire with the narrowing span of life.

Young likens human desire to a shadow cast by the setting sun: as daylight wanes, shadows stretch. So too, as life moves toward its “decline” (old age, the end of one’s days), wishes and longings often grow larger—either because time feels scarce, because regrets sharpen, or because the imagination compensates for diminishing opportunities. The image is quietly ironic: the very moment when fulfillment becomes harder is when craving can intensify. In the moral framework of *Night Thoughts*, the line also nudges readers to recognize the futility of expanding worldly wants late in life and to redirect attention toward lasting, spiritual concerns.