A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day
On the shortest day of the year, with the sun spent and the world's whole sap sunk, the speaker sets himself up as the epitaph of all dead things for whoever loves at the next spring. Love's alchemy has worked him backwards through absence, darkness and death until he is not merely nothing but the quintessence of nothing, the elixir wrung out of the first chaos. Grief is not being described here so much as calculated, and the poem is generally taken as written for a woman already dead.
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