“Oft in the Stilly Night”: Past and Present, Myth and Identity in Delta Wedding

It is accurate to say that the past plays a significant role in Southern narrative, but anyone who says so is making neither a fresh observation nor a particularly helpful one, for the past plays a significant role in most narrative. Few storytellers come to their task with the assumption that the past does not count. Examples from the Iliad to Tristram Shandy reveal narrators struggling to portray the influence of the past on the present, the dead on the living. What seems more useful is to ask how a particular author portrays the relationship between (or the collision of) past and present. Continuing my study of songs in Delta Wedding, I will focus on Thomas Moore’s “Oft in the Stilly Night” and examine some questions that it raises. Particularly, in what ways, in Delta Wedding, does Welty portray the threshold between present time and past time? In what ways do characters perceive the past and the dead?

The Irish poet Thomas Moore (1779–1852) wrote “Oft in the Stilly Night,” also known as “The Light of Other Days,” and published it in the first issue of his National Airs (1819). Like other songs by Moore, such as “Drink to Me Only,” and “Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms,” “Oft in the Stilly Night” became immensely popular during the nineteenth century and continued to be widely known and sung during the first decades of the twentieth. Found in many books for school and family use, even in McGuffey readers, “Oft in the Stilly Night” also was performed as an “art” song in concerts and on recordings. The song is sung twice in Delta Wedding, first by Aunt Shannon, and second, by the family members at the picnic after the wedding.

Shannon Fairchild Miles, one of the old aunts who reared Battle and his brothers and sisters, sings or hums frequently in the narrative. The moment in question is Friday, the day of the wedding rehearsal, in the evening. As Welty describes the scene we do not see Aunt Shannon but merely hear her: “One of those inexplicable pauses fell over the room, a moment during which Aunt Shannon’s voice could be heard in another part of the house, singing ‘Oft in the Stilly Night’” (DW 272). This song is part of the novel’s almost continuous musical discourse (after a few moments pass, we hear Mary Lamar Mackey playing the popular dance tune “Constantinople”). Here is Moore’s text; Welty leaves us to guess what portion the Fairchilds hear:

Oft, in the stilly night,   Ere slumber’s chain has bound me, Fond Memory brings the light   Of other days around me:     The smiles, the tears     Of boyhood’s years,   The Words of love then spoken;     The eyes that shone,     Now dimm’d and gone,   The cheerful hearts now broken! Thus, in the stilly night,   Ere slumber’s chain has bound me, Sad Memory brings the light   Of other days around me. When I remember all   The friends, so link’d together, I’ve seen around me fall   Like leaves in wintry weather,     I feel like one     Who treads alone   Some banquet-hall deserted,     Whose lights are fled,     Whose garlands dead,   And all but he departed! Thus, in the stilly night,   Ere slumber’s chain has bound me, Sad Memory brings the light   Of other days around me.

(“The Light of Other Days”)

The singer, Aunt Shannon, widowed by the Civil War and bereft of brothers and other relatives as well, might seem one whose circumstances nearly match those of the speaker. Yet as Welty makes quite clear, Shannon—at least in her old age—does not experience the loneliness and sense of desertion described by Moore. In fact, she lives comfortably in the presence of the long dead. One scene may serve as an example. Earlier on Friday, Aunt Shannon remarks to her long-dead brother, “Gordon, dear, I’m hot” (207).¹ Moments later she directs her late brother-in-law Duncan Laws to shoot the young man come courting (207). The narrator...