Nocturnal upon St Lucys Day

Question 1

Overview:

Answer 1

The speaker uses the shortest day of the year to reflect on the intense grief of having lost his lover. The speaker compares death as being a void and suggests his grief is absolute.

Question 2

Context:

Answer 2

• A nocturnal - poem of the night.
• Appropriate form in which to explore the emotions associated with the death of a loved one.
• St Lucys Day - winter solstice, shortest day of the year and therefore the darkest.
• Could have been written after Donne’s daughter died.
• Anne Moore had also died.

Question 3

“Tis the years midnight, and it is the day’s Lucy’s”.

Answer 3

• Donne begins the poem by temporally locating himself in the darkest point of the year - figuratively midnight.
• Sibilance reflect the speakers despair.
• The poem may also be about a loss of faith - the light of the world christ has been overshadowed by grief.
• sibilance reference to the snake in the garden of eden.
• referred to in the last line - cyclical shows the speakers eternal suffering.

Question 4

“The sun is spent, and now his flasks send forth light squibs, no constant rays”.

Answer 4

• Donne presents the sun as being exhausted.
• “flasks” - military powder horns - devices containing gun powder in preparation for charging a musket - in the same way that a musket must be filled with gunpowder, os the stars were believed to be filled with light during the day by the sun.

Question 5

“dead and interred; yet all these seem to laugh,/ compared with me, who am their epitaph”.

Answer 5

• Despite establishing that the world is dead - the speaker feels mocked by the dead things as they appear more vital than himself.
• Speaker presents himself as the “epitaph” the summation of all that is dead.

Question 6

“I am every dead thing, In whom love wrought new alchemy”.

Answer 6

• Love is personified as an alchemist.
• It transforms the poetic voice creating a quintessence - yet this is the quintessence of death and emptiness - an inversion of the alchemists conventional goal.
• Semantic field of absence reinforces the hyperbolic presentation of the poetic voices loss.
  “of absence, darkness, death” - asyndeton, plosives.

Question 7

“I, by love’s limbeck, am the grace of all that’s nothing”.

Answer 7

• Alchemic conceit developed further.
• Limbeck - an alchemical device used in the process of distillation.
• Poetic voice claims to be the distillation of nothingness - poetic voice makes his existence meaningless.
• Ending reinforced by the caesura.

Question 8

“we two wept, and so drowned the whole world”

Answer 8

• Petrachan image of emotional excess.
• May be an allusion to the biblical flood - connotations of global destruction.

Question 9

From:

Answer 9

• Elegy - suitable because it is mourning a death.
• Sense of regularity in structure - reflects eternal nature of the speakers suffering.