In the church calendar, the memorial of Saint Lucy falls on December 13. The feast commemorates Lucia of Syracuse, a virgin martyr in the reign of the Emperor Diocletian in the fourth century and has been observed almost from the time of her martyrdom, with particular devotions in Italy and Scandinavia. The name Lucy means light. And so, in Sweden (where this darkest time of the year is especially dark) girls dressed as Saint Lucy in white gowns, red sashes, and crowns of candles still join in Luciatåg, or Lucy-Day processions. S-shaped Lussekatt, Saint Lucy buns, fragrant with saffron, are treats traditionally associated with this feast day.

The current feast day is not the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year (this winter it’s December 21). But for centuries prior to calendar reforms, the feast of Saint Lucy did coincide with the solstice. It was, as John Donne (1572–1631) remarks in today’s Poem of the Day, “the year’s midnight.” Everything about this feast day would have appealed to Donne’s love for juxtaposition and paradox. The feast falls on the day whose early nightfall is the last of the year’s waning. Its darkness ushers in light: not only candles, but the lengthening light of the days to come. All the day’s imagery points to hope, not sorrow.

Yet his poem is about grief and loss. In five nine-line abbacccdd stanzas, waning from pentameter to tetrameter then trimeter, then waxing to pentameter again (in an echo of the year’s turn toward light), the poem’s speaker spells out what he does not hope for now, and what he does. “I am Love’s limbec,” he declares, a little strangely — a limbec, or an alembic, was an early distilling apparatus, through which substances could be purified.