Sheepish Nocturnals on St. Lucy's Day - Asides (XVI)

You might argue that books celebrating nature are best read in the springtime, or with a book that places trees at its heart, dipping into its pages as high summer approaches. Yet here I am, halfway through Wildwood, Roger Deakin’s hymn to the arboreal, just as Saint Lucy’s Day casts its short shadows over the northern hemisphere. We all need a little hope in the middle of winter and Deakin’s book already has me longing for green shoots and gentle summer breezes susurrating through the leaves on Hampstead Heath.

Mary Newcomb, Male and Female Bullfinch (1985)

Reading Deakin’s book has also serendipitously placed images and words together and focused my attention on a different part of a much loved poem. Referencing Saint Lucy’s day - the shortest day of the year in older calendars - was no accident. I can’t be the only one who reaches for John Donne’s sad yet strangely hopeful ‘A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day’ every December 13th.  Like much of Donne’s verse, it is knotty and initially difficult to parse, yet steady, repeated readings reveal its deep magic. It’s a poem that never gets old, and comes around again and again.

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'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.

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I love how Donne references the sinking sap of deep winter, and the binaries of nothingness and life, and how the alchemy of springtime will turn those two things around. And conversely, the despair of the speaker on the death of his lover - or as many argue, Donne’s grief over the death of his wife - jealous of younger courting couples and the rebirth that they get to look forward to. And I love how the poem ends as it begins, an elegant circularity that reminds us that the seasons are cyclical.  

Mary Newcomb, Lady In An Unsprayed Field Seen In Passing (1988)

However, my reading of the poem this year has collided with an artist and a particular painting that Deakin wrote about in Wildwood. Here is his introduction to the English artist Mary Newcomb. 

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'Every now and again if you're lucky, exploring a wood, sitting by a river or looking out of a train, you may experience what a friend of mine calls a Mary moment. Such minor epiphanies, often apparently unremarkable in themselves, will lodge in your memory and may be recalled in their essentials long afterwards. They are the distinctive subjects of the Suffolk painter Mary Newcomb: a flock of goldfinches dispersing, a magpie flying up from a wet road, a football match seen through a hole in an oak leaf eaten by a caterpillar. These are all actual titles of paintings by Mary Newcomb.
 
'Unlike most artists, Mary keeps not a sketchbook but a notebook or diary. She fills it with handwritten thoughts and observations that often find their way into the work verbatim. "Be sure to put it down," she writes in one diary entry, "be it squirrel in a woodpile, men with white-toed boots working on a mountain railway, caterpillars hanging stiffly and staring from a laurel bush, the magnitude of the stars - there is no end." That reference to the stars inevitably suggests one of the best-known Newcomb pictures, the beautiful watercolour Ewes Watching Shooting Stars: three ewes on a clear, cold night, invite you to identify with the animals inside their warm coats.'

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Looking up that very painting immediately brought to mind Donne’s ‘flasks’ of light. No matter that Donne is referencing the sunlight rather than shooting stars, Newcomb’s three stabs of light in a purple sky helped get rid of the knottiness in Donne’s metaphor. In short, Newcomb’s painting spoke to the poem and the poem spoke back.

 

Mary Newcomb, Ewes Watching Shooting Stars (1990)

Happy Saint Lucy’s Day, one and all! Do delve further into the work of Mary Newcomb. You won’t be disappointed.