John Donne's "Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day"

Today, December 13, is Saint Lucy’s Day.  In John Donne’s time, when the old calendar was still in use, it fell upon (and was, therefore, the feast of) the winter solstice.  Donne wrote the poem as he was coming to the end of his days as a ladies’ man.  In the poem he lets the reader know that the experience is growing ever more degrading.  Soon he would marry, take religious orders and begin his later phase writing mystical religious poems.

The earlier poems, with their adoption of scientific metaphors, are the single greatest inspiration to my book of poems Mind Dance.  Some of all of that is evident in this transitional poem.

A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's 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, 

Compar'd 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. 

I plan to continue the celebration of the incredible diversity of our universe and my return to poetry on the Mind Dance Facebook page during the days ahead.  It is intended to be something of a bridge between Mind Dance and the next book of poetry.  Everything that fascinates me and that might come together as a new poem is fair game.  The intention is to look on in wonder and to have a lot of fun.   I hope you will click the “Like” button and join that fun.

Also from the Library of Babel:

• Pierce Butler, Fanny Kemble, et al.  July 22, 2020.  ‘“An attempt of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to make a way around the original Fugitive Slave Law, of 1793, by finding a private agent guilty of kidnapping for having remanded a slave from Pennsylvania to Maryland was forcefully overturned by the U. S. Supreme Court in Prigg v. United States (1842).”’
• The Best Translation of Dante’s Divina Commedia.  July, 14, 2019.  “For the next month, then, I put aside a few hours each night.  Not only with Singleton and Merwin.  In the glorious Age of the Internet, the first step could only be a search for what books relating to the subject were available on Google Book Search and the Internet Archive.”
• A Memoriam for W. S. Merwin.  April 17, 2019.  “It took about three days, as I recall, for me to surrender to the fact that W. S. Merwin was the finest English language poet of his time.  I wished I’d been prepared to read him years ago.”
• Be sure to check out the Browser's Guide to the Library of Babel.

Welcome to the Mind Dance!

Autumn and poetry.  The two have always been closely related in my mind.  Still, I have passed more than five years — each with its autumn — without writing a poem.  Several years before that I was writing only one or two poems a year.

I’ve spent the three most recent years writing and publishing only prose.  It seemed the rational choice.  I must show discipline.  Poetry must be set aside for as long as necessary.  As it was, the odds for success might be somewhat less than 50-50 even with all but perfect discipline.  Even then the indie publishing platforms available to me on the Internet must not contrive to reduce royalties or page views in any substantial way.  While such reductions were clearly likely to happen — given the accelerating trend toward shaking-down those who are nominally contractors for endless hours of sub-subminimum-wage work — I had to hope that the transition would wait long enough for me to establish a firm foothold.

Well, all the eventualities that had to wait didn’t.  All the transitions that needed to be gentle weren’t.  There being nothing to be done about the matter, and autumn being in the air, I return, after far too long an absence, to poetry, and wide-open windows, and blankets on the bed, and bicycle rides.  Fifty-eight poems that I have already had the pleasure of obsessing over, during autumns past, are now gathered together in my first book of poetry, Mind Dance.

The cover of Mind Dance features Spiral Galaxy M74, and is, I think it fair to say, all to the point.  I’ve chosen to strictly limit the time period covered in the book to between the Big Bang and the early 21^st century.  The subjects range from subatomic particles to monks to punk rock singers to pirouetting galaxies speeding away from each other into infinite space.  The dimensions run from the pedestrian 2- and 3-D to who-knows-how-many-D.  In other words, these are poems that deal with more or less normal people leading more or less normal lives.

The personal journey that these poems represent has been fascinating and joyous, dysfunctional and deeply disheartening.  The wonder, the beauty were gifts the universe freely gave.  I could not otherwise have possibly afforded them.  The pain, the ugliness came at a steep price but were otherwise almost impossible to distinguish from them.  The strength the reader will find was hard-earned.  It is my hope that she or he will find some part of all of that in the experience of the reading.

So the reader will find neither Hallmark verse nor chicken scratchings, neither a giant Kumbaya nor an exhausted nihilist rant.  These poems are intended to be both joyous and realistic, as messy and as glorious as the human race.  They have birth in them and death and pretty much everything in between.

I have also published a healthy selection of these poems in Kindle format.  I will be offering that edition for free during the Virtual Publishing Party event.  All of this by way of celebrating the arrival of autumn.  I’ve stinted the season and myself too long.  It is time to put both prose and percentages back into proper perspective.  I need both autumn and poetry back in my life again.

I plan to continue the celebration of the incredible diversity of our universe and my return to poetry on the Mind Dance Facebook page during the days ahead.  It is intended to be something of a bridge between Mind Dance and the next book of poetry.  Everything that fascinates me and that might come together as a new poem is fair game.  The intention is to look on in wonder and to have a lot of fun.   I hope you will click the “Like” button and join that fun.