Comment 4 of 5, added on January 18th, 2006 at 2:17 PM.

This first part of this poem is about the darkening and silencing of a city when the curfew bells ring, the second part of the poem is about a book that is discarded and permenantly forgotten.

The second half borrows similar imagery from the first half of the poem, juxtaposing the two to create a deeper meaning. You have the metaphoric death of the town (basically the town quieting down for the curfew, putting out fires and lights and going down for a long silent sleep) All of which invokes death imagery. Then in the second half you have a forgotten book, sitting in a forgotten room in the darkened village. The key to reading this as a poem about death are the lines: "Sleep and oblivion reign over all", which are repeated twice to end both sections of the poem.

The book in the second half of poem is the Book of Life written by God with the names of everyone in the world (who will live and who will die). I suppose one could read the second half of the poem as the End Times. The book is forgotten and discarded and thus all of humanity is forgotten and discarded, but that may be a bit extreme.

The first half of a curfew, not only open with imagery of a village entering a state of sleep, but also presents us with the very concept of the curfew. The curfew is a restriction on the life of the town itself, it limits freedom to "live" after the bell strikes. In the second half, this is repeated, except now we have the Book of Life written by God, which limits who has the freedom to live. In both cases, the individual is not in control of their destiny, but someone else is controlling their destiny and whether they can live or exist (in the first part of the poem after a certain time in the day, in the latter half, after God has finished the story and forgotten about it). That is what this poem is about: not having control of one's own freedom, of one's own destiny, but obedient to bells and the book of some greater force (the town/God).



Eric