...things ciaf: the lines comes from Book IV, 11. 598-9, of John Milton's Paradise Lost. The poem reads: Now came still Evening on, and Twilight gray Had in her sober Liverie all things clad; Silence accompanied, for Beast and Bird, They to thir grassie Couch, these...

...echoes and revises the epithalamic procession in Paradise Lost that begins, "Now came still Ev'ning on, and Twilight gray / Had in her sober Livery all things clad" (4.598—9); and in its latent eroticism, it recalls the less sober figures of Collins' "Ode to Evening"...