Donne’s love poem: A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day

“A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day” is a poem of Donne on mourning the death of the poet’s beloved. She may be the countess of Bedford whose name was Lucy and who was the poet’s patron. According to some critics Lucy is here the dead wife of the poet Anne More. Any way, the death shocked and depressed Donne so terribly that he compares the distress of his heart to the disheartening atmosphere of St. Lucy’s Day. St. Lucy is goddess of cold and winter i.e. desolation and despair. December 13 is called her day.
Lucy’ s Day is the shortest day of the year. On this day the sun shines hardly for seven hours. So the poet calls the day the midnight of year. It is also the midnight of the day, 13th December. The sun is completely consumed up and it sets. Then the flickering stars appear in the sky and their light is not constant. The world has lost all its interest and vivacity of life. In other words, the poet’s beloved is dead and he has lost his interest in life. All nature is dead. Life seems to have shrunk deep down into the earth like a man stooping to death. Yet, in comparison with the poet the objects of nature seem to be cheerful. But the poet is like the epitaph on the tomb of the dead nature.
The poet advises the future lovers to mark his condition at the coming of the next spring when life and vigor are rejuvenated. By studying him they will come to realize that love creates life out of nothingness. Love has reduced him to nothingness. Love has reduced him to nothingness and made his life a void by darkness and death. But this love again resurrects him out of nothingness, as if, by using alchemy, a mysterious way of cure.
All other people derive all that is good, such as life, soul, form and spirit from the original source of life i.e. from the state of chaos that existed before the creation of the world. Love has distilled him and squeezes a quintessence even out of his nothingness and reduced him to a grave. When his beloved was alive they would weep a flood of tears and would inundate the whole world. When they cared for something they would reduce the world to a chaotic condition. At that time they could not enjoy each other’s company because their respective souls were absent then and their bodies were reduced to mere corpses. In other words, they were physically separated from each other, then their souls remain united outside their bodies. Hence their bodies without souls seemed to be life-less as dead bodies.
The death of his mistress has reduced to poet to absolute nothingness. His nothingness is not only the ordinary nothingness meaning absence of something but it means also the chaos that reigned in the universe before the creation. ‘The first nothing’
Refers to that chaotic condition. But the poet is reluctant to use the word ‘death’ to mean the absence or passing away of his beloved because, he thinks, it is beneath her dignity and it will misrepresent her. She is merely waiting in the darknes of the grave for resurrection. Love will make it possible. For love works towards the essence of life. It is the elixir, which creates life. The bereaved poet thinks that he is not a man. For, if he were a man, he would know that he is a man. Even he is not a beast. Beasts function. They are capable of making a choice of their means and ends. The poet is incapable of all these. So he is worse than a beast. He is neither a plant nor a piece of stone. The plants and stones love and hate, they show sympathy and antipathy. The poet is devoid of such capacities. All have certain properties or qualities. But the poet has none. He is not even an ordinary nothing. He is lower than a shadow too. The shadow needs a light and a body for its existence. He has not such a light and body to show that he is as insubstantial as the shadow.
The condition of the poet is the condition of complete emptiness. His beloved was his sun. That sun has sunk. It will not return to life. That is his beloved will not be restored to life. So absolute darkness has engulfed him. Other lovers are rather more fortunate than he is. For they have lesser sun- the sun that is not as bright as his sun, the beloved. The lesser sun has gone to the tropic of Capricorn to bring from there the fresh life and vitality for those lovers and then they will be able to enjoy themselves in the coming summer. The poet has no grudge against them. As to himself he will prepare himself for his reunion with his lady-love. She is enjoying the long night’s festival and waiting for her resurrection from the grave. At the end of the night the poet and the beloved will have communion. He calls the present hour the hour of her vigil and evening. It is the period of her fasting and prayer as observed at the night of some religions festival. But this period is the longest midnight of the year, as well as the longest midnight of the day. The poet has to wait and prepare himself through fasting and prayer for his reunion with the beloved.
Critical appreciation:
A Nocturnal Upon St. Lucy’s Day” is a typical Metaphysical love poem. But the treatment of love here is a bit different. In this love poem there is no touch of sensual love which we find in donne’s other poems like “the canonization” and “A Validiction- Forbidding Mourning”. Here love is spiritual or platonic.
The poem has a strong elegiac note. It is mourning the death of the poet’s beloved Grierson has rightly remarked that Donne has succeeded in conveying an intense impression of absolute nothingness which may overtake on who has lost the central motive of life: Critic has called the poem the most metaphysical of Donne’s poems, for in it there is a fine metaphysical treatment of permanent division, permanent separation, permanent loveless ness.
The poem has all the qualities of the Metaphysical poetry- conceits images, metaphors, hyperboles, and high imagination. It is written against a backdrop of dejection, emptiness and isolated ness in the life of the poet. The very opening line with its grave and somber movement initiate us into that frightening reality of life. “The poem is a tour de force. Here we have an ethic of love wrung out of privation and nothingness”.
For more information:
http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/donne/nocturnal.htm