Thank you for providing the context for this poem. Maybe it's trite to say, but despite the distance of a few centuries and enormous differences in culture and experience, it's remarkable how much I viscerally feel the same thing that Donne is describing, mourning my own child in the darkest and coldest part of winter.
Circling back to say how much I enjoyed this. The poem itself didn't really stick, for some reason (and nor had it on earlier readings, though there are many other Donne poems that live in my head — poetry is funny, that way). But it was thrilling to learn that Lucia originally fell on the solstice. That makes so much more sense, and knowing it adds to the experience of the Lucia parades, which are a beloved part of winter where I live. Thank you!
Loved the poem and thank you. However, it is a mistake to interupt the poet with definitions of difficult or archaic words. It takes the reader right out of the moment.
oh please, reading Donne is such a pleasure, your choice so sensitive and timely, and so meaningful, my minor criticsm is moronic and i should have just kept my mouth shut. often the context explains the meaning of the word. that's how i learned to read so i am used to filling in the blanks.
They're really supposed to be more marginal, as glosses might appear in a print text, but reading this now on my phone, I can see how on different screens they can be far more intrusive than they appeared on my laptop. Sorry about that.
Very valuable commentary. I've always admired this poem, while realising that it could be charged with over-clever intellectual fireworks. But reassured that in finding genuine depth of feeling in it I'm not wrong. A reader in the 1620s will have had a much better knowledge of cutting-edge anchemy than we do today... maybe it's as if a current poet used imagery of black holes and the heat death of the Universe. (Maybe also the use of alchemy is to avoid bringing any Christian theology into a poem where it really wouldn't fit, there is no Christian Resignation here.)
I really appreciate this intelligent guide to a challenging poem. The thoughtfully chosen illustrations give a second dimension. I had the pleasure of being in Syracuse earlier this year and seeing the magnificent church at the start of the St Lucia procession. I found it particularly moving that it is built around a temple to pagan deities, and traces of that are still present in the building. As my daughter and grand-daughter now live in Sweden, the haunting beauty of the Santa Lucia celebrations has become a signifier of the year’s turning, the move from darkness to light.
The nocturne is at once a grave and moving poem, especially when the reader knows some of the background, and an illustration of what Samuel Johnson objected to in Donne and the metaphysical poets (discussed briefly here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/10/10/john-donnes-proto-modernism)--the abstruse, learned metaphors. Johnson no doubt thought he was relying on a timeless understanding of poetry, when to our eyes he was making a statement about artistic fashions. However, until I learned from this analysis the circumstances of the poem's composition, I considered it overwrought--clever and intense but over the top. (Today's admission against interest.)
Twelve kids and the last one killed Donne’s wife, Anne. Last week an Only Fans star slept with a hundred men in one day. Couldn’t we have found a happy medium somewhere between these extremes?
I second what Francesca wrote. Wow! I never would have known about the two Lucys otherwise. Great job. Perfect poem for today's feast by one of my favorite poets. And thanks for defining the obscure words.
I didn't know all that until I began tracking down a date for the poem. Timelines: the gift that keeps on giving, in ways you don't expect.
I didn't include this detail in my essay, but if Ancestry.com is to be believed, and I have in fact the right Lucy Donne, this daughter was born on the eve of St. Lucy's Day: December 12, 1608 (the same terrible year when Donne wrote his defense of suicide --- he was apparently driven to despair by the feeling, at children's deaths, that on the one hand here was one less mouth to feed, and on the other, that he couldn't afford a burial, all complications of the ordinary natural grief).
If that's true --- and of course there is a line beyond which it's not really that helpful to a reading of a work of literature to go on psychologizing events in the author's life --- you can imagine how the feast day itself would call up that other dawn, with a new life in the house, which perhaps had eased the despair of that year, and so redouble the grief of the extinguishing of that life.
That doesn't necessarily help our reading of the poem, but it does occur to me as a thing driving this speaker's descent into more and more darkness.
I've been posting it on FB every Dec. 13 for years. Now I know its history. That and what you wrote in the post helped my understanding immensely, and increased my enjoyment of the poem.
Thank you for providing the context for this poem. Maybe it's trite to say, but despite the distance of a few centuries and enormous differences in culture and experience, it's remarkable how much I viscerally feel the same thing that Donne is describing, mourning my own child in the darkest and coldest part of winter.
Circling back to say how much I enjoyed this. The poem itself didn't really stick, for some reason (and nor had it on earlier readings, though there are many other Donne poems that live in my head — poetry is funny, that way). But it was thrilling to learn that Lucia originally fell on the solstice. That makes so much more sense, and knowing it adds to the experience of the Lucia parades, which are a beloved part of winter where I live. Thank you!
Loved the poem and thank you. However, it is a mistake to interupt the poet with definitions of difficult or archaic words. It takes the reader right out of the moment.
oh please, reading Donne is such a pleasure, your choice so sensitive and timely, and so meaningful, my minor criticsm is moronic and i should have just kept my mouth shut. often the context explains the meaning of the word. that's how i learned to read so i am used to filling in the blanks.
They're really supposed to be more marginal, as glosses might appear in a print text, but reading this now on my phone, I can see how on different screens they can be far more intrusive than they appeared on my laptop. Sorry about that.
Very valuable commentary. I've always admired this poem, while realising that it could be charged with over-clever intellectual fireworks. But reassured that in finding genuine depth of feeling in it I'm not wrong. A reader in the 1620s will have had a much better knowledge of cutting-edge anchemy than we do today... maybe it's as if a current poet used imagery of black holes and the heat death of the Universe. (Maybe also the use of alchemy is to avoid bringing any Christian theology into a poem where it really wouldn't fit, there is no Christian Resignation here.)
I really appreciate this intelligent guide to a challenging poem. The thoughtfully chosen illustrations give a second dimension. I had the pleasure of being in Syracuse earlier this year and seeing the magnificent church at the start of the St Lucia procession. I found it particularly moving that it is built around a temple to pagan deities, and traces of that are still present in the building. As my daughter and grand-daughter now live in Sweden, the haunting beauty of the Santa Lucia celebrations has become a signifier of the year’s turning, the move from darkness to light.
The nocturne is at once a grave and moving poem, especially when the reader knows some of the background, and an illustration of what Samuel Johnson objected to in Donne and the metaphysical poets (discussed briefly here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/10/10/john-donnes-proto-modernism)--the abstruse, learned metaphors. Johnson no doubt thought he was relying on a timeless understanding of poetry, when to our eyes he was making a statement about artistic fashions. However, until I learned from this analysis the circumstances of the poem's composition, I considered it overwrought--clever and intense but over the top. (Today's admission against interest.)
Twelve kids and the last one killed Donne’s wife, Anne. Last week an Only Fans star slept with a hundred men in one day. Couldn’t we have found a happy medium somewhere between these extremes?
I'm grateful to live in an era when surviving childbirth is a reasonable expectation.
We just finished reading Malcolm Guite’s lovely sonnet written as a response, a diurnal upon St Lucy’s Day:
https://malcolmguite.wordpress.com/tag/saint-lucy/
I second what Francesca wrote. Wow! I never would have known about the two Lucys otherwise. Great job. Perfect poem for today's feast by one of my favorite poets. And thanks for defining the obscure words.
I didn't know all that until I began tracking down a date for the poem. Timelines: the gift that keeps on giving, in ways you don't expect.
I didn't include this detail in my essay, but if Ancestry.com is to be believed, and I have in fact the right Lucy Donne, this daughter was born on the eve of St. Lucy's Day: December 12, 1608 (the same terrible year when Donne wrote his defense of suicide --- he was apparently driven to despair by the feeling, at children's deaths, that on the one hand here was one less mouth to feed, and on the other, that he couldn't afford a burial, all complications of the ordinary natural grief).
If that's true --- and of course there is a line beyond which it's not really that helpful to a reading of a work of literature to go on psychologizing events in the author's life --- you can imagine how the feast day itself would call up that other dawn, with a new life in the house, which perhaps had eased the despair of that year, and so redouble the grief of the extinguishing of that life.
That doesn't necessarily help our reading of the poem, but it does occur to me as a thing driving this speaker's descent into more and more darkness.
I've been posting it on FB every Dec. 13 for years. Now I know its history. That and what you wrote in the post helped my understanding immensely, and increased my enjoyment of the poem.
Very helpful elucidation of this difficult poem!