THE DARK IN THE LIGHT

Today is St Lucy's Day, in the old Julian calendar the winter solstice. Lucy was a martyr under Diocletian, dying in A.D. 304; but her name implies light, and she has often been identified with the return of light after the solstice: in some Northern countries she is represented by a child coming into the room wearing a crown of lighted candles. 

On August 15, 1617 John Donne's beloved wife Ann née More died at the age of 33, after 16 years of marriage and just after giving birth to her twelfth child. And on (or about) December 13, Donne wrote this poem, perhaps the greatest poem of mourning in the English language. Advent, here, seems forgotten: in fact, the poem's mourning is precisely defined and augmented because it creates an appalled opposite of Advent: "nor will my Sunne renew". 

A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day, being the shortest day

'Tis the yeares midnight, and it is the dayes,
Lucies, who scarce seven houres herself unmaskes,
     The Sunne is spent, and now his flasks
     Send forth light squibs, no constant rayes;
          The world's whole sap is sunke:
The generall balme th'hydroptique earth has drunk,
Whither, as to the beds-feet, life is shrunke,
Dead and enterr'd; yet all these seeme to laugh,
Compar'd with mee, who am their Epitaph.

Study me then, you who shall lovers bee
At the next world, that is, at the next Spring:
     For I am every dead thing,
     In whom love wrought new Alchimie.
          For his art did expresse
A quintessence even from nothingnesse,
From dull privations, and leane emptinesse:
He ruin'd mee, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darknesse, death; things which are not.

All others, from all things, draw all that's good,
Life, soule, forme, spirit, whence they beeing have;
     I, by loves limbecke, am the grave
     Of all, that's nothing. Oft a flood
          Have wee two wept, and so
Drownd the whole world, us two; oft did we grow
To be two Chaoses, when we did show
Care to ought else; and often absences
Withdrew our soules, and made us carcasses.

But I am by her death (which word wrongs her)
Of the first nothing, the Elixer grown;
     Were I a man, that I were one,
     I needs must know; I should preferre,
          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 there.

But I am None; nor will my Sunne renew.
You lovers, for whose sake, the lesser Sunne
     At this time to the Goat is runne
     To fetch new lust, and give it you,
          Enjoy your summer all;
Since shee enjoys her long nights festivall,
Let mee prepare towards her, and let mee call
This houre her Vigill, and her Eve, since this
Both the yeares, and the dayes deep midnight is.

A couple of explanations help, for a modern reader. He says that, as a result of being ruined by Love, the alchimist who had previously favoured him, he is reborn as the quintessence of Nothing; and defines that negatively by the various orders of being. Men -- humans -- are defined by consciousness; animals are defined by desire; plants and stones also "desire" (plants grow upward because they desire the light; stones fall downward because they desire the earth, or if magnetic desire each other. An "ordinary nothing", like a shadow, still implies a substance of which it is a shadow.