Today’s Poem: A Nocturnal Upon St. Lucy’s Day
Revisiting John Donne
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A Nocturnal Upon St. Lucy’s Day, Being the Shortest Day
by John Donne
’Tis the year’s midnight, and it is the day’s, Lucy’s, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks; The sun is spent, and now his flasks Send forth light squibs, no constant rays; The world’s whole sap is sunk; The general balm th’ hydroptic earth hath drunk, ◦ hydroptic = fluid-filled Whither, as to the bed’s-feet, life is shrunk, Dead and interr’d; yet all these seem to laugh, Compared with me, who am their epitaph. Study me then, you who shall lovers be At the next world, that is, at the next spring; For I am every dead thing, In whom Love wrought new alchemy. For his art did express A quintessence even from nothingness, From dull privations, and lean emptiness; He ruin’d me, and I am re-begot Of absence, darkness, death — things which are not. All others, from all things, draw all that’s good, Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have; I, by Love’s limbec, am the grave ◦ limbec = alembic, distilling apparatus Of all, that’s nothing. Oft a flood Have we two wept, and so Drown’d the whole world, us two; oft did we grow, To be two chaoses, when we did show Care to aught else; and often absences Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses. But I am by her death — which word wrongs her — Of the first nothing the elixir grown; Were I a man, that I were one I needs must know; I should prefer, If I were any beast, Some ends, some means; yea plants, yea stones detest, And love; all, all some properties invest. If I an ordinary nothing were, As shadow, a light, and body must be here. But I am none; nor will my sun renew. You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun At this time to the Goat is run To fetch new lust, and give it you, Enjoy your summer all, Since she enjoys her long night’s festival. Let me prepare towards her, and let me call This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this Both the year’s and the day’s deep midnight is. ═══════════════════════
In the liturgical calendar, the memorial of Saint Lucy, or Lucia, of Syracuse, whose name means light, falls on December 13. This feast day, of course, is not the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, which in our current calendar occurs on or around December 21. But prior to 16th-century Gregorian calendar reforms (not adopted in England until significantly later), the feast of Saint Lucy did coincide with the solstice. It was, as John Donne (1572–1631) remarks in Today’s Poem, truly the shortest day, “the year’s midnight.”
Everything about this feast day would have appealed to Donne’s love for juxtaposition and paradox. It fell on the day whose early nightfall was the wane of the year’s waning. This darkness would literally have ushered in light: not only candles in the long night, but the lengthening light of the days to come. All the holy day’s most obvious imagery points to hope, not sorrow.
Yet Donne’s poem on this day is about grief and loss: “a valedictory,” as the critic Carol Marks Sicherman has noted, “not to the dead beloved, but to the dead self who loved her.” Published in 1633, two years after Donne’s own death, “A Nocturnal for St. Lucy’s Day” dates plausibly from 1627. That year found the poet grieving the deaths of two women, each of whom, in her way, had been a source of light. Both women were named Lucy.
The first Lucy was Donne’s 18-year-old daughter, who had died in June of 1626. Of Donne’s twelve children with his wife, Anne, three had died before the age of ten, and two more had been stillborn, including the last child, in 1617. Anne had followed that child in death five days later.
This Lucy was one of the survivors. Her death occurred in a period when her father’s fortunes had risen, with a Royal Chaplaincy, appointments to two parish livings, and elevation to the position of Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral. Donne had mourned deeply for his wife; the earlier deaths of his children, in the midst of financial anxiety, had induced the state of mind in which he wrote his 1608 Biathanatos, in defense of “self-homicide.”
By the mid-1620s, however, the horizon was brighter: children mostly grown, career stable, health improved after a grave illness in the early winter of 1623. In the midst of a level of comfort — perhaps even of relative complacency — unprecedented in Donne’s adult life, the death of this daughter must have smitten with a renewal of all that former grief.
And the second Lucy? She was Lucy Russell, the glamorous and gifted Countess of Bedford (b. 1581), who had died in March of 1627. Patroness to Donne and other poets and musicians of the same era, including most notably Ben Jonson, she was also godmother to Lucy Donne, the poet’s daughter, named for her — which may indicate the intensity of Donne’s esteem.
For Donne, in a poem addressed to her, Lucy Russell was “the first good angel” and “God’s masterpiece,” the compounder of a “mithridate” (an alchemical remedy for poisoning) composed of “learning, and religion, / And virtue.” In the course of her life, the Countess had patronized many poets. In his decade as a widower, Donne had had one muse.
Each of these deaths would have represented a light extinguished: the light of life itself, and the light of affection, but also the light of the particular hopes that the father and poet had lodged with these two Lucys, daughter and benefactress. Together, they inform the sense of loss that animates Today’s Poem. Together they become that she whom the very word, death, “wrongs.”
In five nine-line abbacccdd stanzas, waning from pentameter to tetrameter then trimeter, then waxing to pentameter again (in an echo of the wane and wax of daylight), this “dead self,” bereft of hope, speaks from the threshold between night and day — “the year’s midnight,” as well as the day’s. It is, as well, his life’s midnight, on a “hydroptic” earth, reality as he perceives it reduced to a teardrop.
In this moment of anticipation, all creation yearning toward the light, the speaker’s “hydroptic” interior world turns from darkness to darkness. For him, time does not stand still, nor does it promise any renewal. Inverting the expected scheme of resurrection imagery, he declares, “I am re-begot / Of absence, darkness, death — things which are not.”
In a further reversal, now of the image of“mithridate” Donne had associated with the Countess of Bedford, his speaker has, “by Love’s limbec” — a limbec, or an alembic, was an early distilling apparatus, through which substances could be purified — been distilled to some concentrated essence of negativity. “I am . . . / Of the first nothing the elixir grown.”
He has waned, like the daylight, to nothing. In the world of the living, daylight will come again and lovers look forward to the frolicsome springtime — “Enjoy your summer all.” But he looks forward only to another dark year of absence. His one hope lies in a reunion in the “long night’s festival” of the grave.
It's so compelling that the imagery of water evokes grief but also "the first nothing", the watery darkness and chaos before the light of creation and any good being.
Thanks so much for the background of this compelling poem.