‘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.
Source: http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/donne/nocturnal.php
Donne, John. Poems of John Donne. vol I.
E. K. Chambers, ed., London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1896. 45-46.
In ‘A Nocturnal’ the juxtaposition of sexual pleasure with death, that Donne uses in many of his other poems, is transformed into the correlation of death and idealistic, neo-Platonic love. Here, Donne uses images of death, darkness and midnight to express the persona’s sorrows resulting in the loss of the beloved. To intensify the emotions of the speaker Donne adapts the imagery of matins which liturgy is concerned with the reconciliation of opposites and the intense experience of the oppositions, such as night and day, dark and light, death and life, and nothingness and being.
The speaker’s emotions correspond to the barren and lifeless earthly surroundings, where ‘life is shrunk, / Dead and interr’d’. Although the death of a beloved woman and the winter scenery are the source of the speaker’s sorrows, the persona states ‘For I am every dead thing (…) re-begot / Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not’. Death, therefore, is a marking point, a threshold, and, just as God created life itself from the void, the speaker can create everlasting life from the ‘nothings’ of individual deaths. The prospect of reunion with the beloved in the afterlife brings hope to the speaker of the poem. It reflects the idea of life as a cycle of dying which can be broken only by the final death, which is a passage into the eternal life. In ‘A Nocturnal’ Donne suggests that ‘I am by her death (…) / Of the first nothing the elixir grown’ and like the death of nature during winter, which precedes spring, the deaths of a man are part of the same, unending continuum.
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