Evening is the time when new feelings – and new poets – are born. In her sonnet “To Twilight” (1786), Helen Maria Williams celebrated the hour that “wakes the tear 'tis luxury to shed,” and the next year, William Wordsworth took up this idea in his first published poem, “On Seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams Weep at a Tale of Distress” (1787). In an entirely imaginary scene, he describes the poet's outpouring with a metaphor borrowed from Williams' own sonnet: her tears manifest inner virtues that shine in “misery's midnight hour,” just as “the soft star of dewy evening” emerges to “cheer the wand'ring wretch with hospitable light” (9–14). In Wordsworth's sonnet, as in Williams', evening serves as a figure for latency and compensation: a new light-source replaces the sun, and what was invisible or repressed in the diurnal world of social interaction emerges, therapeutically, in the solitude of dusk.

In this vein, the 1798 Lyrical Ballads includes two twilight poems that assert the poet's peculiar imaginative work: “The Tables Turned,” subtitled “An Evening Scene,” in which Wordsworth represents himself as a scholar of nature who counsels his studious friend to quit the day's literary labors to savor the “first sweet evening yellow”; and “Lines written near Richmond, upon the Thames, at Evening,” in which he eulogizes the famous celebrant of Evening, William Collins, by imagining himself drifting in a boat, listening to the water dripping from his suspended oars.