Happy solstice!

Celebrating the darkest day of the year seems odd at first thought. Why should anyone want to mark the darkness, the disappearance of the sun, the hard times? Why mark the hard times? 

Because without the hard times, you can never really understand the good ones. Because next to the dark, the light glows ever brighter. Because struggling through the dark gives you strength.

Because, while this night may be the darkest of all, tomorrow--tomorrow--things will change. Tomorrow the light begins to grow.

So, let's celebrate with some poems!

When I was a Russian major (er, that became a minor), we read Doctor Zhivago (in translation). Here is a poem I always liked from it:

Wind

I have died, but you are still among the living.
And the wind, keening and complaining,
Makes the country house and the forest rock--
Not each pine by itself
But all the trees as one,
Together with the illimitable distance;
It makes them rock as the hulls of sailboats
Rock on the mirrorous waters of a boat-basin.
And this the wind does not out of bravado
Or in a senseless rage,
But so that in its desolation
It may find words to fashion a lullaby for you.


I discovered John Donne through Dorothy L. Sayers, and was delighted to find while doing genealogy that the brother of one of my ancestors and his wife were personal friends with him. They both left him things in their respective wills. Here is the first stanza of Donne's poem for this day (the rest can be found here):

A Nocturnal Upon St. Lucy's Day, Being the Shortest Day

'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,
Compared with me, who am their epitaph.


Shakespeare's funny ditty entitled Winter, from Love's Labour's Lost. Poor Greasy Joan. I mean, who wants to be memorialized like that??

Winter

When icicles hang by the wall,
And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,
And Tom bears logs into the hall,
And milk comes frozen home in pail,
When blood is nipp’d and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
Tu-whit;
Tu-who, a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

When all aloud the wind doth blow,
And coughing drowns the parson’s saw,
And birds sit brooding in the snow,
And Marion’s nose looks red and raw,
When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
Tu-whit;
Tu-who, a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

Happy Solstice! And now I'm off, because I still have Christmas stuff to finish...