"To the Evening Star" begins with a rapturous apostrophe to a personified star-turned-goddess. As the "sun rests on the mountains" and the day comes to an end, the speaker begs the "fair-hair'd angel of the evening" to light her "bright torch of love," don her "radiant crown," and offer her blessing to everyone getting ready to go to their "evening bed."
The speaker's metaphors of "torch" and "crown" paint a picture both of a real star's glinting light (which might indeed suggest the sharp points of a tiara or the fiery brightness of a torch) and a goddess decked out in her queenly regalia. If this is the "evening star"—another name for the planet Venus, the first "star" to appear in the sunset sky—then perhaps this "angel" has something in common with Venus herself, the Roman goddess of love, beauty, and sex.
In a moment of reverent anaphora, the speaker provides another hint that this goddess might preside over sacred love:
[...] smile upon our evening bed!
Smile on our loves; [...]
The speaker's prayer that this "angel" will "smile" on both beds and love suggests that she offers a blessing to lovers in particular.
In these first lines, then, the poem paints a picture of a world making its gentle way toward sex and sleep. The "evening star" hangs over it all, a protective, regal force who smiles on everything that happens beneath her.
These images of peace and balance, though, are a little at odds with the poem's form:
- At first glance, readers might expect this poem to be a sonnet: it's 14 lines long, and seems to be written in iambic pentameter (that is, lines of five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm: "Put on, | and smile | upon | our eve- | ning bed!").
- But there's no sonnet rhyme scheme here. Even more disorientingly, what seems at first to be blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) will soon veer off course into all sorts of unexpected rhythms.
As readers will soon see, this tension between order and unpredictability will turn up in the poem's world, not just its form.