The wakeful nightingale,
She all night long her amorous descant sung;
Silence was pleas’d: now glow’d the firmament
With living sapphires: Hesperus, that led
The starry host, rode brightest, till the moon,
Rising in clouded majesty, at length
Apparent queen unveil’d her peerless light,
And o’er the dark her silver mantle threw.

These lines come from John Milton’s epic poem *Paradise Lost* (first published 1667; revised 1674). They occur in the Edenic setting early in the poem, as Milton lingers over the beauty and order of the prelapsarian world. The passage is part of a nocturnal description in which nature—birdsong, silence, stars, and moonlight—forms a harmonious backdrop to Adam and Eve’s life before the Fall. Milton’s learned cosmological imagery (Hesperus/Venus leading the “starry host”) reflects both classical poetic tradition and seventeenth-century astronomical interest, while also serving his larger theological project of depicting creation as originally serene, hierarchical, and radiant.

Milton juxtaposes sound and stillness—“the wakeful nightingale” singing while “Silence was pleas’d”—to suggest a cosmos in perfect balance, where even quiet is not absence but a receptive presence. The sky’s “living sapphires” and the procession from Hesperus to the moon create a regal pageant of light, culminating in the moon as “apparent queen” casting a “silver mantle” over darkness. The imagery idealizes night not as threatening but as ordered and beneficent, reinforcing Eden’s innocence. At a deeper level, the passage models Milton’s sense of created hierarchy: celestial bodies “lead” and “unveil,” implying purposeful governance—an order that will later be disrupted by disobedience.