Poetry Collection: The Dark Hours

Overview
Don Marquis’s 1924 collection The Dark Hours turns from the jaunty wit of his newspaper columns to a sustained meditation on bereavement, solitude, and endurance. The poems unfold across the sleepless span between midnight and dawn, when grief is most insistent and the mind, stripped of daylight distractions, confronts love’s absence and the mysteries of time and death. Rather than a narrative arc with plot, the book offers a sequence of vigil-like stations: night watches, remembered rooms, city streets hollowed of noise, and a mind circling loss until first light returns. The cumulative effect is a map of grief’s weather, its tempests, calms, and sudden clearings, drawn with a plainspoken gravity that refuses melodrama.

Themes
The central presence is an absent one: a beloved gone beyond recall, whose nearness persists in memory, habit, and the daily furniture of life. The poems explore how sorrow alters perception, turning familiar corners strange and amplifying the small sounds of a sleeping city into a kind of metaphysical clock. Marquis’s speaker wrestles with the double nature of night, at once a refuge from social performance and a merciless brightening of inward pain. Out of this struggle emerge questions about the soul’s fate, the reliability of faith, and the meaning of continuance when consolation is uncertain.

A countercurrent runs alongside the elegy: a stubborn affirmation of human resilience. Marquis treats courage not as a trumpet blast but as the quiet labor of getting through another hour, another dawn. Love is figured as both wound and provision, the very thing that makes suffering sharp and also what steadies the sufferer. Where formal theology falters, he leans on tenderness, memory, and a wary humility before the unknown.

Style and Setting
The language is lucid, often conversational, tempered by moments of sonorous cadence. Marquis draws on traditional meters and rhymes when he wants the girding pressure of form, but he also loosens into freer measures to catch the irregular pulse of thought at 3 a.m. The city is not merely backdrop; its streetlamps, river fogs, and distant wheels become emblems of transit and delay, of messages half-heard and lives intersecting without touching. Natural images, stars, wind, the sea’s dark breathing, broaden the poems’ emotional weather, setting personal loss against a cosmos that neither explains nor mocks it.

Voice and Progression
Across the sequence the speaker moves through recognizable phases: angry protest, bargaining, exhaustion, and a wary acceptance that does not cancel love or grief but learns to carry them. This progression is not linear; certain nights regress, others leap forward with an unexpected ray of kindness or humor. Marquis’s instinct for the demotic, honed by years as a columnist, keeps the poems grounded in dailiness: a lamp turned low, a chair left empty, a letter read and folded. Even at his most speculative, he resists grand abstractions in favor of images that can be held in the hand.

Context and Significance
Composed in the wake of intimate loss, The Dark Hours reveals the serious poetic current beneath Marquis’s better-known comic creations. It bridges the public clamor of the 1920s and the private reckoning that follows a ruptured life, offering readers a companionable candor rather than a system of answers. The book’s lasting impression is of a voice keeping watch, steady, unillusioned, and tender, until the dark gives way to a workable light, and with it the modest, courageous business of going on.