Tender Is the Night

“Already with thee! tender is the night…

   …But here there is no light,

   Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown

   Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.”

This quote, taken from John Keats’s poem “Ode to a Nightingale,” makes up the book’s Epigraph and is the source for its title. Keats’s poetry in large heavily dealt with contemplations of nature, dreams, and time. This specific poem deals with themes of death and the passage of time, appropriate in comparison to the novel’s depiction of characters striving for a fulfillment they never achieve and realizing too much time has been lost in the pursuit.

“Even in their absolute immobility, complete as that of the morning, she felt a purpose, a working over something, a direction, an act of creation different from any she had known.”

When Rosemary first meets the Divers, she idealizes these two American expatriates as the greatest and most original of modern people. This quotation highlights Rosemary’s innocence as well as the idealism of a bygone generation, which has no more place in the void of post-World War I gloom. The “morning” of the quote is hopeful but will prove to be short-lived.

“New friends can often have a better time together than old friends.”

Dick speaks this line to Rosemary after she has declared her love to him, and the meaning of the statement (the narration tells the reader) somewhat goes over Rosemary’s head. It is a dismissive way of responding to someone’s expressions of love, but more so it underhandedly comments about the oddity and fickleness of human relationships in general, observing how unlikely connections can illogically thwart the deep, ingrained ties of old connections.