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.

Here, however, he himself seems to have been distilled, by love and grief, to some concentrated essence. He has waned, like the daylight, to nothingness. The night’s darkness and emptiness suggest, for him, a reversed resurrection. Love “ruin’d me, and I am re-begot / Of absence, darkness, death — things which are not.” Where other lovers look forward to springtime frolicking, his hope looks toward a lovers’ reunion in the “long night’s festival” of the grave. 

A Nocturnal Upon St. Lucy’s Day, Being the Shortest Day
by John Donne

’Tis the year’s midnight, and it is the day’s,
Lucy’s, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks;
    The sun is spent, and now his flasks
    Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;
      The world’s whole sap is sunk;
The general balm th’ hydroptic earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the bed’s-feet, life is shrunk,
Dead and interr’d; yet all these seem to laugh,
Compared with me, who am their epitaph.

Study me then, you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is, at the next spring;
    For I am every dead thing,
  In whom Love wrought new alchemy.
      For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness;
He ruin’d me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death — things which are not.

All others, from all things, draw all that’s good,
Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have;
  I, by Love’s limbec, am the grave
    Of all, that’s nothing. Oft a flood
      Have we two wept, and so
Drown’d the whole world, us two; oft did we grow,
To be two chaoses, when we did show
Care to aught else; and often absences
Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses.

But I am by her death — which word wrongs her —
Of the first nothing the elixir grown;
  Were I a man, that I were one
  I needs must know; I should prefer,
      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 here.

But I am none; nor will my sun renew.
You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun
  At this time to the Goat is run
  To fetch new lust, and give it you,
      Enjoy your summer all,
Since she enjoys her long night’s festival.
Let me prepare towards her, and let me call
This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this
Both the year’s and the day’s deep midnight is.

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.