Compline

Compline is the hour of night prayer invoked as a threshold of solitude and surrender. In a speech addressed to an estranged son, it marks the approach of being alone, while the surrounding language holds endings and renewed beginnings in uneasy suspension.

The Hour of Solitude

The speaker anticipates the Compline hour as the moment when being alone will present itself. The hour gives a temporal edge to his address: he speaks just before yielding his spirit to the wind, as though the day’s close were also a reckoning with separation and mortality. Compline is not developed as a liturgical scene; it functions instead as a named limit, the approaching point at which speech gives way to solitude.

Confession at the Threshold

Before invoking the hour, the speaker calls himself both guilty and dispossessed, declaring, “My fault, his fault, a kingship through a fault!” He addresses a firstborn son whom he says he has forsaken and who, in turn, has left and laughed at him. His account moves through accusation, self-reproach, and grief, making the approach of Compline the setting for a family estrangement spoken aloud rather than resolved.

An Ending That Begins Again

The passage complicates the apparent finality of nightfall. The royal figure has not yet drunk, and the spaniel pack, quarry, retainers, and public-house proprietor have not moved; what has happened, the speaker says, has yet to be done and done again. Against the approaching hour of being alone, this suspended action makes Compline part of a recurring temporal pattern: the close of a day promises an ending, but the world remains poised to repeat itself. The hour therefore carries both the intimate weight of farewell and the larger passage’s refusal of a final, settled conclusion.