NOCTURNAL 21.12.2024

Last year on the solstice I invited people to join an online discussion of John Donne’s ‘A Nocturnal upon St Lucie’s Day’. Not this year, although the poem feels even more apposite.

I don’t care how much dispute there is about when it was written and for whom. For me, the Nocturnal was written in 1617. That was the year Donne lost his wife Anne, a few days after the still-born birth of their twelfth child. Twelve children — and she was only 33. He was about 45. He would be dead by sixty, but he wrote this particular reflection with some way yet to go. Of course, he didn’t know that. None of us knows how or when it will be. The readiness is all.

Anne Donne died (I firmly believe) in the August of the year he wrote this poem, and he wrote a sonnet for her then. But the Nocturnal came later in the year. It was December and getting darker and darker, in every sense. Three of his children had died in infancy. There had also been two still-born babies. And now Anne, the children’s mother and the love of his life, had gone too.

John Donne was four months into the deepest grief he had known. He was writing at night, by candlelight, thinking back on all that had been. Thinking about the lovers he and Anne had been and would not be again. He believed — of course he believed — that her immortal soul would live. But that didn’t take away the pain.

He felt he was dead too, as numb as dead wood, and yet not dead at all but strangely alive, and so he made this beautiful thing, this highly patterned, intricate piece of verse. It is as ornate and carefully paralleled as the patterns in a leaf. As complex as that, and as simple. As easy, and as hard, to understand. He made it four hundred years ago.

The human feeling in this poem reaches out. I feel it, as Hamlet said, in my heart’s core. Often I forget what it is I look for in poetry. And then I come back to John Donne, and I know. Here is what I long for: this pure, distilled feeling. And somehow, although Donne’s heart was heavy, his poem lightens the room. I’m not sure how or why. Maybe it’s the feeling of connection over centuries, the feeling shared.

I haven’t lost a partner this year, but I know and care for those who have. We are mortal. We grieve and we reflect and we walk on, until we don’t. I’m a dozen years older than Donne was when he died. But my time will come, like his. We’re part of the same thing. I feel it syllable by syllable ‘since this / Both the yeares, and the dayes deep midnight is.’

(While writing the paragraphs above, I printed out my text to read back and check. I held it too near the candle and it ignited. Not at all poetic. Fortunately, I managed not to set the house on fire. They were better at this kind of thing in the seventeenth century.)

Painting: Matthias Sturm, Young Man Reading By Candlelight.