Night (Ralph poem)

Night, a Poem in Four Books is a 1728 blank verse poem by the British writer James Ralph. Issued in quarto by the London printer J. Roberts, it comprises about 1,100 lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter arranged in four books. The poem reflects on London after dark—urban corruption, mortality, and nocturnal imagery—and participates in the late-1720s vogue for descriptive blank verse associated with James Thomson’s The Seasons.

Night received little contemporary notice until Alexander Pope, after Ralph answered the first edition of the Dunciad with Sawney, added a couplet about Ralph and the poem in the 1729 Variorum. Contributors close to Pope, notably the Grub-Street Journal (1730–33), then used Night as a target. Modern criticism reads the poem both as an early graveyard-poetry text and as a Whig allegory of metropolitan corruption, and Ralph soon shifted from such blank-verse experiments to satire and drama.