Percy Bysshe Shelley

Good-night

the hour is ill

Shelley treats the hour itself as sick or wrong—not the parting, but the time that forces it. The hour becomes the villain.

I
Good-night? ah! no; the hour is ill

the hour is ill

Shelley treats the hour itself as sick or wrong—not the parting, but the time that forces it. The hour becomes the villain.

severs those it should unite

Nighttime conventionally separates lovers (propriety, separate bedrooms). Shelley argues night should do the opposite—unite them in darkness and privacy.

Which severs those it should unite;
Let us remain together still,
Then it will be good night.
II
How can I call the lone night good,
Though thy sweet wishes wing its flight?
Be it not said, thought, understood—

Be it not said

Three levels of prohibition: don't speak it, don't think it, don't understand it. He's trying to erase the concept of parting from existence.

Then it will be—good night.
III
To hearts which near each other move
From evening close to morning light,
The night is good; because, my love,

They never say good-night

The final paradox: the night is only good when you never acknowledge it's night. Lovers who stay together erase time itself.

They never say good-night.
I

the hour is ill

Shelley treats the hour itself as sick or wrong—not the parting, but the time that forces it. The hour becomes the villain.

the hour is ill

Shelley treats the hour itself as sick or wrong—not the parting, but the time that forces it. The hour becomes the villain.

Good-night? ah! no; the hour is ill
Which severs those it should unite;

severs those it should unite

Nighttime conventionally separates lovers (propriety, separate bedrooms). Shelley argues night should do the opposite—unite them in darkness and privacy.

Let us remain together still,
Then it will be good night.
II
How can I call the lone night good,
Though thy sweet wishes wing its flight?

Be it not said

Three levels of prohibition: don't speak it, don't think it, don't understand it. He's trying to erase the concept of parting from existence.

Be it not said, thought, understood—
Then it will be—good night.
III
To hearts which near each other move
From evening close to morning light,
The night is good; because, my love,
They never say good-night.

They never say good-night

The final paradox: the night is only good when you never acknowledge it's night. Lovers who stay together erase time itself.

Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

The Logic of Not Parting

This poem is structured as an argument against saying goodbye. Shelley builds his case across three stanzas, each redefining what makes a night "good."

Stanza I argues from immediate feeling: the hour is "ill" (diseased, wrong) because it separates lovers. His solution is simple refusal—"Let us remain together still." Only then will the night deserve its conventional blessing.

Stanza II shifts to language itself. Even if they must part physically, he wants to eliminate the word and concept: "Be it not said, thought, understood." This is characteristic Shelley—the Romantic belief that language shapes reality. If they don't name the parting, perhaps it won't fully exist.

Stanza III presents the ideal: lovers "which near each other move / From evening close to morning light." The phrase "near each other move" is deliberately ambiguous—physical proximity, emotional synchrony, or both. These lovers experience night as continuous presence, never marking its boundaries with farewells. The poem's final line loops back to its opening word, but transformed: "good-night" becomes the thing that destroys goodness.

Shelley's Defiance of Convention

CONTEXT Shelley wrote this around 1820-1821, during his Italian exile with Mary Shelley. His personal life was marked by unconventional relationships and defiance of social norms—he'd eloped with Mary while still married to Harriet Westbrook.

The poem reads as polite on the surface but is actually radical in its implications. When he argues that lovers should "remain together still" through the night, he's challenging early 19th-century propriety that required unmarried or even married couples to sleep separately in respectable households.

Notice the conditional grammar: "Then it will be good night" appears twice, each time as a future condition. The night is never actually good in the present moment of the poem—it's always deferred, always dependent on staying together. This creates a sense of perpetual postponement.

The poem's simplicity is deceptive. The vocabulary is almost childlike ("good," "night," "still," "love"), the rhyme scheme is basic (ABAB), and the rhythm is regular iambic tetrameter. But this nursery-rhyme surface carries a serious philosophical point: that social conventions about time and separation are arbitrary, and lovers have the right to reject them.