The poem’s title establishes one of its main themes. To make amends means to repair some harm or damage that has been done. The word “amends” also implies a kind of restoration after a rift. The title, then, suggests that the poem will be about some kind of rift—in this case the rift between the natural world and industrial society—and how it is or is not repaired, or “amended.”
The poem then begins with the phrase “Nights like this,” which is perhaps a subtle allusion to Act 5, Scene 1 of Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice. In the scene, two characters, Lorenzo and Jessica, are speaking outside at night. Lorenzo, who is trying to seduce Jessica, comments on the moonlight and describes romantic scenes that took place in the past “[i]n such a night as this.”
Within the play, Lorenzo alludes to traditional views of moonlight as romantic—and also, implicitly, feminine—in order to suggest to Jessica that this night could be romantic for them. Yet importantly, within the scene, Jessica is skeptical: she seems resistant to Lorenzo’s advances and rebuffs the romantic view of the moonlight that he attempts to establish. From the outset, then, the poem subtly alludes to past descriptions and conceptions of the moon as romantic and feminine while also suggesting a skeptical response to these assumptions about what the moon must represent.
The continuation of the opening line confirms this skepticism, and the poem’s departure from classical, romantic views of “nights like this.” First, the poem pauses for a caesura of white space before going on, marking the gap between the speaker’s allusion to Lorenzo’s speech and the poem’s own direction.
Then, the poem doesn’t describe a romantic scene, but rather a “cold apple-bough,” or the branch of an apple tree, on which “white star[s]” appear to “explode[e] out of the bark.” This imagery can be read in several ways:
- The speaker could refer to apple blossoms, which within the nighttime scene resemble the shape of stars.
- Alternatively, the speaker suggests that the moonlight strikes the tree in such a way as to resemble white stars “exploding” out of the tree itself; the white light on the bark is star shaped.
In both readings, the speaker makes use of a metaphor, comparing the apple blossoms, or the moonlight, to another aspect of the scene at night—the stars. The image of white stars exploding is beautiful, but notably unromantic. The image seems to be one of the cosmos and eternity, not intimate human love.
These opening lines also set up the unique way in which the poem will work with syntax (basically, the arrangement of words) and pacing. The verb that appears in these lines (“exploding”) is in the gerund form, conveying a sense of the movement of the natural world as ongoing. The enjambment of line 2 adds to that feeling of forward momentum, pulling readers down the page:
a white star, then another
exploding out of the bark: