At the end of his analysis of the ‘Vida retirada’ poem, Ricardo Senabre wrote: ‘Urge […] afrontar el estudio del sistema metafórico de fray Luis.’ He was arguing against the predominant biographical interpretation of the poem, in which its search for a life of peaceful contentment was read as the poet's desire to be free of the disputes and conflicts of Salamanca, and the famous garden ‘por mi mano plantado’ was identified with the Augustinian estate of La Flecha or another such retreat. He demonstrated persuasively that the classical, biblical and Patristic resonances of many of Fray Luis's metaphors, like the garden, the stormy sea and imprisonment, required a more literary reading. In turning to two of his most familiar ‘Odas’, the ‘Vida retirada’ and the ‘Noche serena’, I intend to take Senabre's plea seriously. To do so, in the first of these I will focus on the structural and thematic function of metaphors of movement drawn from the elements of air and water, and follow the trajectory of the second as it develops out of its initial contrast between two contrasting types of night vision, one upwards into the starry heavens, the other downwards to the sleeping earth. There is nothing especially original about the ideas Fray Luis expresses in these poems, drawn as they are from the common currency of neo-Stoical and neo-Platonic philosophy used by many Golden Age writers.