what do you think this poem means?

Question

The Night Has a Thousand Eyes by Frances WIlliam Bourdillon

The night has a thousand eyes,
And the day but one;
Yet the light of the bright world dies
With the dying sun.
The mind has a thousand eyes,
And the heart but one;
Yet the light of a whole life dies
When love is done.

Answer 1

I am glad you liked the poem. It is from a book my mom gave me for Christmas way back when I was 12 years old 1988 lol.
One Hundred and One Famous Poems.
Contemporay Books Inc. Chicago copyright 1958

Answer 2

The starts are the thousand eyes of the sky at night. The sun is the only eye of the sky during the day. The heart, which loves, is compared with the sun, while the mind, with its calculating ways, is more like the night and its small stars. When the heart stops beating, the light of a whole life dies (When love is done - i.e. the heart)

Answer 3

maybe the eyes are sources of light
and the heart only has one cause it's in love with one person.
Randy Travis sang about how time makes a young girls hair turn grey and a man forget things he new. " It's easy to see it's happening to me, I've already forgotten every woman but you.

And the relationship ended so the guy (sorry I look at things from a guys perspective) or girl, feels the world ended when the relationship did. I know that feeling. for a while your depressed, it's like what's the point. Then after a while maybe somethin happens and you make it through the day without crying. Or you meet someone else. I think it might be what Douglas Adams was reffering to in his book The Dark Teatime of The Soul. I've never read that book. It's a good poem in that it evokes emotion.
Whithout being to on the nose, leaving room for thought ya know.

Answer 4

Well obviously the "eyes" are the stars. The last portion refers to that when you lose a loved one or someone, perhaps the only one, who is dear to you, a part of you goes with it, and thus you become sad and depressed, like a light within you slowly dying out. I think the middle passage refers to the many ways the mind thinks and the many aspects, but the heart has only one aspect and way of thinking (in a vague, partially unexplainable way). The upper mid section may refer to the lights of a town gradually turning off as night comes, or when people sleep and are dead to the world when the sun goes down.

Answer 5

The Night is a metaphore for the mind (intellect) the Day is a metaphore for the heart. It's saying that when a person has no one to love, or no one to love him/her, then that's like the sun setting on that person's life (not necessarilly that that person dies, but that their joy, their will to live, is gone); all that's left is the intellect.