A NOCTURNAL UPON ST LUCY'S DAY (THEMES) Flashcards
What are the 4 main themes of the poem?
- Darkness of time and the natural world.
- Destructive capacity of love.
- Grief and mourning,.
- Alchemic transformations (Alchemy)
How does the poem convey the theme of grief and mourning?
- The speaker expresses deep, consuming sorrow,
- Describing himself as emotionally and spiritually dead.
“I am every dead thing”
“Oft a flood / Have we two wept”
How does alchemy function as a metaphor in the poem?
- Donne inverts the concept of alchemy and describes himself as the residue left after a distillation process, as if all meaning and essence have been extracted from him.
For I am re-begot / Of absence, darkness, death”
How does Donne link darkness, time, and nature to the speaker’s despair?
- The poem takes place on St. Lucy’s Day, once considered the darkest, shortest day of the year.
- Donne uses this temporal metaphor to express his personal despair: just as nature is decaying, he is emotionally decaying.
“The world’s whole sap is sunk”
“This is the year’s midnight”
How does Donne depict love as something destructive rather than fulfilling?
- Future lovers should look at him as a warning—love does not always elevate; it can reduce a person to nothing.
- Thus, he is a cautionary relic of love’s power to destroy.
“Study me then, you who shall lovers be / At the next world”
“Love’s limbeck”
- A limbeck is an alchemical device used for distillation.
- Here, the speaker implies that love has boiled away his essence, leaving him hollow.
Limbeck- alchemical distillation device.
“The world’s whole sap is sunk” meaning/ signficance.
- Sap= Life/vitality/energy
- Life has drained away, mirroring both the winter season and the speaker’s own emotional desolation.
“The general balm th’ hydroptic earth hath drunk” signficance?
- Hydroptic means excessively thirsty
- The earth is described as desperate for sustenance, yet it has consumed the “balm” (healing force) without relief.
- Links to the process of death that doesn’t give much back.
“Dead and interr’d; yet all these seem to laugh/Compar’d with me, who am their epitaph” signficance?
- Donne’s speaker is surrounded with a morose lifelessness, but he sees himself in even a worse state than those dead and buried. (not in a fixed state- floating between life and death)
- He seems himself as a “epitaph” the very marker of death/ living tombstone for his beloved.
“In whom Love wrought new alchemy.
For his art did express/A quintessence even from nothingness”
- “New alchemy” = instead of turning something bad (base metals) into good (precious metals) love has transformed him into a drained empty person.
- Quintessence= Believed to be the 5th element/pure essence/ and made up of the heavens.
- While Love may have created something pure or beautiful, it also has taken everything from him,
“Two chaoses”
- refer to disorder, confusion, turmoil. The speaker suggests that together, he and his lover have become 2 forces of chaos contributing to an emotional or relational disintegration
- (another neg transformation)
DCT-DISORDER, CONFUSION, TURMOIL
“But I am by her death (which word wrongs her/Of the first nothing the elixir grown” signficance?”
- “Of the first nothing” refers to the primal void before creation,
- a state of pure absence of non existence.
- The speaker identifies with this “non-existence” due to his grief.
- The speaker is transformed from nothingness into a distillered version of nothingness
“I should prefer/If I were any beast,
Some ends, some means; yea plants, yea stones detest”
- Even lowly beasts have a purpose (ends) and a capacity to achive it (means)
- Plants can even ‘detest’ (grow away from) what harms them or love (move towards) what sustains them)
The speaker has lost this elemental/ exisintial responses
