The Full Text of “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day”
1'Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's,
2Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks;
3 The sun is spent, and now his flasks
4 Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;
5 The world's whole sap is sunk;
6The general balm th' hydroptic earth hath drunk,
7Whither, as to the bed's feet, life is shrunk,
8Dead and interr'd; yet all these seem to laugh,
9Compar'd with me, who am their epitaph.
10Study me then, you who shall lovers be
11At the next world, that is, at the next spring;
12 For I am every dead thing,
13 In whom love wrought new alchemy.
14 For his art did express
15A quintessence even from nothingness,
16From dull privations, and lean emptiness;
17He ruin'd me, and I am re-begot
18Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not.
19All others, from all things, draw all that's good,
20Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have;
21 I, by Love's limbeck, am the grave
22 Of all that's nothing. Oft a flood
23 Have we two wept, and so
24Drown'd the whole world, us two; oft did we grow
25To be two Chaoses, when we did show
26Care to aught else; and often absences
27Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses.
28But I am by her death (which word wrongs her)
29Of the first nothing the Elixir grown;
30 Were I a man, that I were one
31 I needs must know; I should prefer,
32 If I were any beast,
33Some ends, some means; yea plants, yea stones detest,
34And love; all, all some properties invest;
35If I an ordinary nothing were,
36As shadow, a light and body must be here.
37But I am none; nor will my Sun renew.
38You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun
39 At this time to the Goat is run
40 To fetch new lust, and give it you,
41 Enjoy your summer all;
42Since she enjoys her long night's festival,
43Let me prepare towards her, and let me call
44This hour her Vigil, and her Eve, since this
45Both the year's, and the day's deep midnight is.
The Full Text of “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day”
1'Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's,
2Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks;
3 The sun is spent, and now his flasks
4 Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;
5 The world's whole sap is sunk;
6The general balm th' hydroptic earth hath drunk,
7Whither, as to the bed's feet, life is shrunk,
8Dead and interr'd; yet all these seem to laugh,
9Compar'd with me, who am their epitaph.
10Study me then, you who shall lovers be
11At the next world, that is, at the next spring;
12 For I am every dead thing,
13 In whom love wrought new alchemy.
14 For his art did express
15A quintessence even from nothingness,
16From dull privations, and lean emptiness;
17He ruin'd me, and I am re-begot
18Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not.
19All others, from all things, draw all that's good,
20Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have;
21 I, by Love's limbeck, am the grave
22 Of all that's nothing. Oft a flood
23 Have we two wept, and so
24Drown'd the whole world, us two; oft did we grow
25To be two Chaoses, when we did show
26Care to aught else; and often absences
27Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses.
28But I am by her death (which word wrongs her)
29Of the first nothing the Elixir grown;
30 Were I a man, that I were one
31 I needs must know; I should prefer,
32 If I were any beast,
33Some ends, some means; yea plants, yea stones detest,
34And love; all, all some properties invest;
35If I an ordinary nothing were,
36As shadow, a light and body must be here.
37But I am none; nor will my Sun renew.
38You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun
39 At this time to the Goat is run
40 To fetch new lust, and give it you,
41 Enjoy your summer all;
42Since she enjoys her long night's festival,
43Let me prepare towards her, and let me call
44This hour her Vigil, and her Eve, since this
45Both the year's, and the day's deep midnight is.
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“A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day” Introduction
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"A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day" is John Donne's poem of profoundest grief. Love, the poem's speaker recalls, once worked a glorious transformation on him, changing his life infinitely for the better. But when the speaker's beloved dies, love turns on him, making him into the "grave / Of all that's nothing," an emptiness without desire, feeling, or identity. Love, in this poem, is a dangerous alchemist, a creator and a destroyer: it makes lovers more alive than they ever were, then deprives them of all it gave them when death comes along. This poem was first published in Donne's posthumous collection Poems (1633).
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“A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day” Summary
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It's the darkest moment of the year, the midnight of the winter solstice on St. Lucy's Day—a day that shows its face for barely seven hours. The sun is all used up, and the stars (the sun's powder-kegs) only dimly shine, like weak fireworks, sending out no steady beams. The vital life's-blood of the world has drained away; the sickly, swollen earth has drunk it all up. Life shriveled up so that its limits were as near as the foot of the bed; then it died and was buried. But all these grim sights seem positively cheerful compared with me: I'm the epitaph on the world's tomb.
Take a good look at me, then, you people who will fall in love when the renewal of the world rolls around in the spring. For I'm the prime example of something that has died even after undergoing love's beautiful transformations. Love once distilled me, transforming me into the purest and most beautiful thing—extracting my essence from nothingness, from want and starved emptiness. Then love destroyed me. Now I have been reborn from loss, darkness, death: things that are nothings.
Everyone in the world but me takes good from the world around them. They draw a life, a soul, a shape, a spirit from the world, and thus have an existence. But through love's distillation of me, I'm nothing but the burial ground of nothingness itself. My beloved and I often used to cry together, so much it seemed as if we might flood the whole world. And we often used to become as wild as the Chaos before Creation when one of us paid attention to someone else and the other felt jealous. And when we were forced to be apart, we often felt as if our very souls had been ripped away from us, leaving us nothing more than corpses.
But now that my beloved is really dead (though it's an insult to her to say so), I have been made into the very essence of the nothingness that existed before Creation. If I were still a human being, I'd know it. If I were any living creature, I'd have some kind of desires or preferences. Even plants, even rocks have feelings of hatred and love. Everything in the world has some kind of substance. If I were even a regular old nothing, like a shadow, that would imply a light and a body casting the shadow.
But I am truly nothing. And my Sun, my beloved, will never come back. So, you young lovers, for whom the literal sun has just entered the sign of Capricorn, on its way to bring you more desire: enjoy your summertime. But since my beloved is entering the long night of death, let me prepare to follow her. Let me say that this hour is the time to honor her as one would honor a saint, since this is both the year's and the day's midnight.
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“A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day” Themes
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The Annihilating Force of Grief
In “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day,” a speaker looks out at the darkest moment of the darkest night of the year—midnight on the winter solstice—and sees in the gloom a reflection of his own dreadful grief and loss. Mourning his beloved, who has recently died, he feels as if he himself is dead, or deader than dead. Grief, he says, makes him “nothing.” For this speaker, to deeply grieve is not merely to be heartbroken, but to be annihilated, destroyed altogether.
St. Lucy’s Day, the speaker observes, is a fitting time to mourn. Just as the sun seems to have withdrawn on this darkest day, the metaphorical “Sun” of his life—his beloved—has gone away, draining the light from his world. The difference is, his beloved sun will never come back. The rest of the world will enjoy a spring again, but this speaker knows that the light of his life cannot “renew.”
In the absence of his beloved, the speaker feels that he has become an embodiment of the “first nothing”: that is, of the primordial chaos before God created the universe (in Donne’s Christian understanding). He feels so completely hollow, so dead himself, that he can’t even say he has as much substance as an “ordinary nothing” like a shadow. Even a shadow implies a “light” and a “body,” he observes; even "plants" have "prefer[ences]" and desires. But his nothingness is something deeper than this. He has no substance, no desire, and no feeling. He’s not just nothing, he’s the “grave / Of all that’s nothing”: the place that even nothingness goes to die.
This harrowing image captures the experience of absolute and paralyzing grief. The speaker’s loss doesn’t merely leave him heartbroken, it leaves him without an identity: his beloved’s death annihilates him as surely as it annihilated her.
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The Transformative Power of Love
Love, in “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day,” is a transformative force—for better and for worse. John Donne presents love as an alchemist, a philosopher who can transform worthless material into gold. But love has a darker alchemical power, too. Falling in love makes this poem’s speaker into something better and more beautiful than he was before, but losing his love ruins him completely. Such transformations, this poem suggests, reveal the great and terrible power of love: love is equally a creator and a destroyer.
Back before he first met his beloved, the speaker remembers, he was little more than a “dead thing.” Alone, he suffered “dull privations, and lean emptiness”: that is, he felt hollow, lonely, hungry, and deprived. But when love came along, it “wrought new alchemy” on him, working a transformation on the “nothingness” of his previous being. Love transformed him into a “quintessence”: that is, it elevated his dead self into the same material that (according to Renaissance thinkers) the stars were made of. This transformation also made him into the best and purest version of himself; a “quintessence,” as well as being star-stuff, can be the most glorious, perfect version of a thing.
This beautiful transformation, alas, has a dark side. When the speaker’s beloved dies and he’s left alone again, love works another alchemical transformation on him. Where, before, love made him into a “quintessence,” now “Love’s limbeck” (that is, its alchemical distilling equipment) transforms him into the very “Elixir” of the “first nothing.” In other words, it turns him into something as completely empty and dead as the nothingness that existed before the creation of the universe. If he was a “dead thing” before he knew his beloved, he’s the very “grave / Of all that’s nothing” now that she’s gone.
As an alchemist, then, love is a dangerous figure. When a person falls deeply in love, this image suggests, they can be transformed into the very best and most beautiful version of themselves. But when they lose that love, they’re utterly destroyed. Such a destructive grief, the poem hints, is part of love, the equal and opposite side of love's glory, inescapable in this mortal world.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day”
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Lines 1-4
'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;This poem begins at the darkest moment of the darkest day of the year. It's the midnight of St. Lucy's Day, December 13—the date that once marked the winter solstice (when the Julian calendar was still in use). The speaker introduces the date in ringing, solemn tones, framing this first line with emphatic parallelism:
'Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's,
This phrasing puts midnight right at the center of the line—and stresses the idea that this moment marks a double midnight. Here at midwinter, the sun has never seemed farther away.
The speaker personifies St. Lucy's Day as an elusive, shielded woman. (Perhaps he's imagining the day as St. Lucy herself. St. Lucy was an early Christian martyr; because her eyes were plucked out, she was the patron saint of the blind, and thus a fitting saint to honor on the darkest day.) She "scarce seven hours herself unmasks," the speaker says: in other words, the day removes the "mask" of night for only seven hours before hiding away again.
The sun who presides over this day, meanwhile, is personified as something like a washed-up soldier. He's "spent," all used up, and so is his fiery energy. His "flasks" (that is, his powder-flasks, vessels for storing gunpowder, here a metaphor for the stars) can't even find the power to shine with "constant rays." They only emit "light squibs," halfhearted little drib-drabs of light, faint and unimpressive as cheap fireworks.
These images open the poem on a note of exhaustion and frustration. The image of the worn-out, impotent sun and stars—once full of explosive, gunpowdery energy, now barely able to muster a squib—show how far the heavens have fallen. And the vision of the day as a lady all-too-briefly unmasking herself offers some subtle, bleak foreshadowing. For this "Nocturnal" (a poem of the night) will tell the story of the speaker's grief. He has lost a woman he loved—a woman whose face was also only too briefly unveiled to him.
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Lines 5-9
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. -
Lines 10-13
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. -
Lines 14-18
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. -
Lines 19-22
All others, from all things, draw all that's good,
Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have;
I, by Love's limbeck, am the grave
Of all that's nothing. -
Lines 22-27
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. -
Lines 28-29
But I am by her death (which word wrongs her)
Of the first nothing the Elixir grown; -
Lines 30-36
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. -
Lines 37-41
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; -
Lines 42-45
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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“A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day” Symbols
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Darkness
Darkness works as a symbol of both the speaker's grief and his lady's death. Darkness, as the speaker puts it, sits alongside "absence" and "death" as an example of "things which are not": it's not so much a thing in itself as the lack of something that was once there. In the speaker's life, two kinds of symbolic darkness have descended:
- His lady—the "Sun" of his life—has died, leaving him without the metaphorical light of her presence.
- And, in his grief, he has himself become a "nothing" like the darkness left behind after the sun sets.
It's for these reasons that St. Lucy's Day—the winter solstice, the darkest night of the year—makes a fitting setting for this poem of grief. The darkness of the "year's midnight" reflects the absence in the speaker's soul.
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Winter and Spring
In this poem as in many others, the seasons of the year symbolize the seasons of human life. Midwinter becomes a symbol of death and grief, while spring and summer symbolize young love and new life.
The speaker begins the poem by looking around at a midwinter world drained of its life's blood. Here at the winter solstice on St. Lucy's Day, "the world's whole sap is sunk": the energy that brings the world to green life has oozed away into the dirt. Indeed, all "life is shrunk" as if "to the bed's feet": the world's life seems as limited and fragile as the life of a mortally ill person whose world only extends as far as the foot of their bed. That image symbolically links the lifelessness of winter with the death of the speaker's beloved—and, by extension, with the speaker's own future life, a wasteland of grief-stricken nothingness every bit as bleak as the midwinter landscape.
Spring, by contrast, is both the literal time when lovers frolic and a symbol of their youth and hope. Young lovers, the speaker observes, are enjoying the "summer" of their lives as much as they enjoy the actual summertime. But the grieving speaker stands as a warning that summer can never last forever.
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“A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Conceit
At the heart of “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day” is the conceit (or extended metaphor) of love as an alchemist: a scholar of transformation. Alchemy was the practice of (among other things) attempting to transmute worthless materials into gold. In this poem, love certainly has that power—but it also has the power to undo its work, annihilating the beauty it created. By presenting love as a merciless, two-faced alchemist, Donne explores both the glory and the cost of love. This conceit makes it clear that there’s no way to love without facing grief, sooner or later.
The speaker first encounters love as an alchemist in its more glorious guise. When love first goes to work on him, he says, it transforms him from a “dead thing” into something wonderful:
For [love’s] art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness;In other words, love comes along and goes to work on the “nothingness” of the speaker’s solitary life. Love transmutes the dead, inert loneliness he’s been suffering from into a “quintessence”—a word used in the Renaissance to describe the so-called fifth element, the exalted, ethereal substance from which the stars and planets were said to be made. Falling in love makes the speaker feel sublime, as if he’s part of the heavens. What’s more, love makes him into the best version of himself: a “quintessence” can also be the most perfect expression of a thing.
But this experience of glory can only last as long as his beloved’s life does. When the speaker’s lady dies, love comes along and goes to work on him again, but in a very different way:
I, by Love's limbeck, am the grave
Of all that's nothing. […]A “limbeck” is a piece of distilling equipment. And what love distills from the speaker now is a feeling deader than death, an experience of the ultimate “nothingness.” This experience makes the speaker the terrible mirror image of the "quintessence” he rose to when his beloved was alive.
Personified as an alchemist, love thus appears to be both the most benevolent and the cruelest force imaginable. Love works transformative miracles on the lovers it touches. But the cost of such a transformation is the inevitable counter-transformation of loss. Love the alchemist raises lovers to a quintessence, then annihilates them.
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Personification
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Metaphor
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Allusion
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Repetition
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Parallelism
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Alliteration
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"A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks;
- Spent
- Flasks
- Squibs
- The world's whole sap
- The general balm th' hydroptic earth hath drunk
- As to the bed's feet, life is shrunk
- Interr'd
- Epitaph
- Wrought new alchemy
- Quintessence
- Privations
- Re-begot
- Limbeck
- Oft
- Chaoses
- Aught
- Elixir
- Yea plants, yea stones detest, / And love
- All, all some properties invest
- I am none
- The lesser sun
- The Goat
- Her Vigil, and her Eve
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St. Lucy's Day was celebrated on December 13 and marked (by the earlier Julian calendar) the darkest night of the year. The image of "unmasking" here refers to the length of daylight on this day: the sun only shows its face for seven hours.
St. Lucy was the patron saint of blindness, further emphasizing a theme of utmost darkness.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day”
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Form
As its title suggests, “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day” is a nocturne—that is, a work of art set during the night (and thus the dark opposite of the aubade, a dawn poem). For this poem’s speaker, this is the darkest night of the year both literally and metaphorically:
- He’s writing on December 13th, St. Lucy’s Day, marked as the shortest day of the year according to the Julian calendar. (The Gregorian calendar now marks the winter solstice on December 21 in the northern hemisphere).
- He’s also writing of the disappearance of the “sun” of his life: his beloved, who has died.
The literal darkness mirrors the speaker’s emotional darkness. He’s engulfed in a grief so deep that it makes him feel he’s become a creature of “absence, darkness, death: things which are not.”
The poem’s shape matches its mood. Each of the poem’s five nine-line stanzas mirrors the dwindling of the light. The first five lines gradually shrink from iambic pentameter (lines of five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in “All oth- | ers, from | all things, | draw all | that's good”) down to iambic trimeter (just three iambs, as in “Enjoy | your sum- | mer all”). The speaker then returns to iambic pentameter for the last four lines of each stanza, with a regularity that mirrors his unshakeable and perpetual grief.
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Meter
“A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day” uses one of Donne’s characteristic varied meters. Each stanza follows this pattern:
- The first two lines are written in iambic pentameter. That means they use five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in “All oth- | ers, from | all things, | draw all | that's good.”
- The third and fourth lines use iambic tetrameter—four iambs, as in “The sun | is spent, | and now | his flasks.”
- The fifth line uses iambic trimeter—just three iambs, as in “If I | were an- | y beast."
- And the rest of the stanza returns to iambic pentameter.
This rhythm suits the poem’s setting and theme. The first five lines of each nine-line stanza do what the poem describes: like the sun on the darkest day of the year, they dwindle away. The four steady closing lines, meanwhile, chime with the speaker’s mournful certainty that the metaphorical sun—his beloved lady—won’t be returning for him ever again.
While the stanzas always follow the basic pattern mapped above, the lines are full of irregularities and variations. Such bumpy, unpredictable rhythms are also very characteristically Donne (as the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge memorably pointed out when he imagined Donne's poetic muse trotting around on a camel).
Take line 21, for instance. This tetrameter line breaks away from the steady da-DUM pulse of iambs:
I, by | Love's lim- | beck, am | the grave
The first foot there is a trochee—the opposite of an iamb, with a DUM-da rhythm. Then, even more dramatically, Donne hits one strong stress after another in a spondee (a foot with a DUM-DUM rhythm). These irregular and emphatic rhythms lend extra weight to this dreadful moment. The speaker here imagines himself as the victim of Love's terrible alchemy, distilled to the very essence of nothingness by his beloved's death.
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Rhyme Scheme
The poem's rhyme scheme runs like this:
ABBACCCDD
This pattern moves from a more reflective, enfolding sound in the ABBA portion to a driving intensity in the CCC triplet and the DD couplet. There's a falling, weighty feeling to these rhymes: that final couplet lands with a thud.
This movement of rhyme mirrors the speaker's mood of inert despair. Like the sun on St. Lucy's Day, like the speaker's soul under the influence of love and death, the rhymes seem to circle or rise for just a second, then plummet to earth—hard.
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“A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day” Speaker
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The speaker of "A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day" is a lover annihilated by grief after his beloved's death. A deeply passionate man, he remembers feeling transformed when he first fell in love. Back then, love, like an alchemist, distilled his "quintessence": in other words, it made him the best and purest version of himself, raising him to glory.
But alas, love's transformations don't stop there. When the speaker's beloved dies, love alchemizes him again—but this time, much for the worse. In his grief, the speaker feels as if he has become the distilled "Elixir" of the "first nothing": the absolute darkness, nothingness, and chaos that existed before God created the universe. In his grief, he himself feels dead, or beyond dead. Even "plants" and "stones," he says, have opinions and desires. Not he: without his beloved, he is left utterly without feeling, dark and inert as the "grave."
In his passion, his grief, and his labyrinthine imagination, the speaker resembles no one so much as John Donne himself. Many critics speculate that Donne composed this poem after the untimely death of his beloved wife Anne, who died giving birth to a stillborn child in 1617.
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“A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day” Setting
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This poem is set at midnight on St. Lucy’s Day, December 13. Measuring (as Donne and his contemporaries did) by the Julian calendar, St. Lucy’s Day marked the winter solstice, the darkest day of the year—or, as the speaker puts it, “the year’s midnight.” (The Julian calendar has since been replaced by the Gregorian calendar, which marks the winter solstice on December 21 in the northern hemisphere.)
It’s the dead of winter, then, and the engulfing darkness perfectly suits the speaker’s bleak mood. Grief-stricken after the death of his beloved, the speaker feels that he has become a creature of night and nothingness. While, after this low point, the rest of the world will start getting gradually brighter and spring will return again, the speaker knows that he can never rejoin the hopeful cycle of the seasons. With his love dead, he won’t see an emotional rebirth ever again. Spring will mean nothing to him.
In the moment of this poem, then, the speaker’s inner and outer worlds are perfectly (and bleakly) in tune. It's the "year's midnight," the "day's deep midnight," and the speaker's emotional midnight all at once.
The only possible light in this darkness comes from the poem's allusions to Christian faith. St. Lucy was the patron saint of the blind (as her own eyes, the legend has it, were plucked out), and her midwinter holiday was celebrated as a festival of lights. Honoring his lost lady on St. Lucy's Day, the speaker introduces just the ghost of a hope that his spiritual light might one day be restored—and that, God willing, he and his beloved will meet again at the end of time.
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Literary and Historical Context of “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day”
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Literary Context
John Donne (1572–1631) is remembered as one of the foremost of the "Metaphysical poets"—though he never called himself one. The later writer Samuel Johnson coined the term, using it to describe a set of 17th-century English poets who wrote witty, passionate, intricate, cerebral verse about love and God. (George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, and Thomas Traherne were some others.)
Donne was the quintessential Metaphysical poet: a master of elaborate conceits and complex sentences and a great writer of love poems that mingle sacred images with cheeky puns. But during his lifetime, he was mostly a poet in private. In public life, he was an important clergyman, rising to become Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London. (Many poets of Donne's time didn't widely publish their work, instead circulating it in manuscript among a few friends. See "The Triple Fool" for some of Donne's thoughts on the perils of poetic publication.)
Like the vast majority of Donne's poetry, "A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day" (fully titled "A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day; being the shortest day") didn't appear in print until several years after his death. It was first collected in the posthumous book Poems (1633).
Donne's mixture of wit, passion, and mysticism fell out of literary favor after his 17th-century heyday. For instance, when Johnson (a leading figure of the 18th-century Enlightenment) coined the term "Metaphysical poet," he did not mean it as a compliment. Johnson saw Donne and his contemporaries as irrational and obscure. But 19th-century Romantic poets like Samuel Taylor Coleridge were stirred by Donne's mixture of philosophy and emotion, and their enthusiasm slowly resurrected Donne's reputation. Donne is now remembered as one of the most powerful and influential of poets, and he inspired later writers from T. S. Eliot to A. S. Byatt.
Historical Context
Much of John Donne's earlier verse draws on his youthful days as a notorious ladies' man. His sometimes foolhardy decision-making around women came to a head in an oddly touching way: when he fell deeply in love with Anne More, an important official's daughter, he eloped with her without getting her family's permission. This romantic leap of faith backfired on him when his wife's furious father had him thrown in prison. Donne famously jotted down a little epigram about this personal disaster: "John Donne, Anne Donne, Undone." (The rhyme lets us know how the poet pronounced his name: DUNN, not DAWN.)
While Donne was eventually reconciled with his father-in-law, this was a rocky beginning to a marriage that would see a lot of difficulties. The Donnes and their many children lived in relative poverty. In order to stay financially afloat, Donne was forced to be literally afloat: he sailed on endless business trips all over Europe and was often away from home for long stretches of time. Many of his passionate love poems tell the stories of tearful farewells.
It was while Donne was away on one of his trips that tragedy struck back home: Anne Donne died giving birth to a stillborn child in 1617. Many critics believe that Donne wrote this poem in the wake of that grievous loss.
The heartbroken Donne turned to his religious faith for consolation—and to support his 10 surviving children. Under the patronage of King James I, Donne became a prominent and successful Anglican clergyman, the Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London. In that capacity, he wrote devotional verse every bit as passionate as his love poetry.
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More “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day” Resources
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External Resources
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A Portrait of Donne — Admire a portrait of Donne in his dashing youth.
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A Brief Biography — Learn more about Donne's life and work via the Poetry Foundation.
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Anne Donne's Epitaph — See the epitaph John Donne composed for his wife, written in his own hand.
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to the actor Richard Burton reading the poem.
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A Celebration of Donne — Read an article by Donne's recent biographer Katherine Rundell.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by John Donne
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