Donne's Nocturnal

Abstract

In Donne's poem, A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies day, Being the shortest day,1 the word nocturnal is understood in the first place as 'night-piece' - the meaning given in the Oxford English Dictionary directly referring to this locus. 'Nightpiece', applied to a poem, is transferred from visual art: Ben Jonson uses the word to describe the cloudy back-cloth of his Masque of Blackness,2 and Webster, in the closing scene of The White Devil, makes Lodovico acknowledge his part in the tragedy as having 'limn'd this night-piece'.3 Herrick and Vaughan use the word in its transferred sense.4 Nocturnal, however, also carries a religious overtone as officium nocturnale, and may be found in this sense denoting the last service of the day. By analogy with such words as diurnal, ordinal - and even Herrick's trentall5 - used in a religious context, nocturnal takes on a solemn, ceremonious quality appropriate to the commemoration of St Lucy's Day, here marked - old style - as the shortest day of the year, the winter solstice. As St Lucy's name indicates, the saint, in the words applied to her by St Agatha, is 'indeed a light', but this is the day that contains the fewest daylight hours, and so must be considered the darkest of the year; the irony of what has been celebrated as a festival of light as the year reaches its nadir adds to the poignancy of the poem, Lucy its only light. Donne further emphasises the darkness of his spiritual annihilation by using the language of alchemy; the process of nigredo is a total reduction, marked by the repeated 'nothing' that particularises his desolate state.So far the language is richly layered, but there is a further dimension. In A Valediction, of Weeping, he had envisaged the world map, as it might be by Mercator's projection, as marvellously figuring the creation itself:On a round ballA workeman that hath copies by, can layAn Europe, Afrique and an Asia,And quickly make that, which was nothing, All.6It is a commonplace that the new discoveries of science inset in what had hitherto been the common stock of literate knowledge augmented poetic vocabularies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and Donne was able to draw upon the cabinet of curiosities opened up by new explorations and new philosophies. In a figure based on the effect of the moon on ocean tides, when the gravitational pull was observed but not understood, he develops his imagery out of the supposition (noted by Roger Bacon in his Opus Maius) that the moon's rays drew up vapours from the bottom of the sea, causing the ocean to swell. His hyperbolical image takes in legends of the Flood, whose limit was believed to touch the sphere of the moon; the attractions of the lady he addresses are deemed far in excess of the lunar powers:O more than MooneDraw not up seas to drowne me in thy Spheare7In a similar fashion, in the Hymne to God my God, in my sicknesse Donne exploits the new cartography by depicting the sick body as a cosmic map superimposed on a world map such as actual explorers might have used. The body-map marks out the journey of the soul towards the west, by tradition the place of death into which the sun nightly disappeared, but as the flat map curves round to follow the shape of the real world when pasted on a globe, the farthest west becomes the east, the Orient, from which the sun rises. The Orient is further identified with Christ, the dayspring, so that the journey towards death is a journey towards eternal life. The merging of east and west is similarly recorded in Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward:There I should see a Sunne, by rising set,And by that setting endless Day beget.8The language of Donne's Nocturnall relies heavily on the technical vocabulary of alchemy. But as Donne had used the physical imagery of the map to chart his spiritual journey towards death, cross-referencing the microcosm, man, with the macrocosm, the universe, so that the body of the dying man itself becomes the map, in this poem the state of the bereaved lover makes him the instrument by which the lowest point in the year is marked, the field shifted from earth to sky. …