The Cold Light of Dawn
We love to celebrate the winter solstice yet what is it in us, as readers and writers, that is so drawn to the darkness?
Season’s greetings, Readers.
December 21 is my favourite day of the year, not for its brevity but because it marks the beginning of the sun’s steady growth to summer. As my friend Lizzie, whose story featured here some months ago, had it, the light rises “a cock’s step” each day. The phrase is apt as the cock or rooster heralds the dawn, and soon we will rejoice at the first call of the cuckoo, and the early snowdrops.
In my office hangs a photograph of sunlight making its brief annual appearance in the megalithic chamber at Newgrange. Framed beside the picture is the text of Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘A Dream of Solstice’.
. . . we watch through murk And overboiling cloud for the milted glow Of sunrise, for an eastern dazzle To send first light like share-shine in a furrow Steadily deeper, farther available,
Some believe the structure is a passage tomb, others that it is a way station in a sun worshipper’s pilgrimage. A sequence of smaller but equally ancient buildings animated by the spring, summer and autumn equinoxes bear out this theory. As we know, many ancient religions deified the sun, from the Egyptian Ra to the Persian Mithra and there were earthly versions too, such as Louis XIV, the Sun King, hiding in his gilded palace at Versailles.
When I lived in Australia I was invited to a Christmas party on 21 June, perfectly logical as that is the winter equinox in the southern hemisphere. Festivities around the world at this time of year feature lights of all descriptions, including the wreath of candles worn by young women in Sweden for the feast of St. Lucia, patron saint of the blind. The Indian festival of lights, Diwali, takes place at the end of the warm season, when the days cool down. But here’s the question: why do we devote more time and money to celebrating light in winter than in summer?
There is something undeniably more seductive about the flicker or glimmer of a light in darkness than in the full blaze of a summer’s day. Those of us who live in the northern hemisphere complain about the cold, damp and darkness of the winter and yet there is a twist in our psychology that is drawn to the dark, the shadowy, the elusive. Look no further than the current enthusiasm for ‘Scandi Noir’, gruesome stories set in a landscape famed for its extremes of light from the midnight sun, to its endless night which affords the possibility of seeing the Aurora Borealis. There is no matching genre of books about white nights.
By contrast, the full blaze of sunlight is associated with exposure, a word with several pejorative connotations (unless you’re a Kardashian), whereas darkness evokes mystery, shadows, the thrill of fear, as Francis Bacon said ‘Men fear death, as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children, is increased with tales, so is the other.’ And how we love those tales!
Mystery stories, which trade in the dark side of human nature, involve shining the cold light of day on the truth. By contrast, the glow of candle, fire and lamp light is warm and cheery. Like moths to the candle I believe our imagination is more attracted to that flickering beam which casts darkness into relief. After all readers prefer Dante’s ‘Inferno’ and Milton’s hell, where there is no light but only ‘darkness visible’, to their light-filled Paradises.
Heaney opens his solstice poem with a quote from Dante’s ‘Paradiso’:
Like somebody who sees things when he's dreaming And after the dream lives with the aftermath Of what he felt, no other trace remaining, So I live now, for what I saw departs And is almost lost, . . .
What Dante’s pilgrim saw was a vision of God but he struggles to fit the image of humankind into the three circles of ‘Great Light’ until ‘then a great flash of understanding struck/my mind’. Language fails him at that point and he can only speak of how he feels his will and desire ‘impelled by the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.’ This is the final line of The Divine Comedy.
The first version of Heaney’s poem echoes the medieval poet’s words, as the poet wonders is the beam of sunlight the ‘star pivot’ and says, ‘Like his, my speech cannot/Tell what the mind needs told’. Heaney also uses Dante’s rhyme scheme, terza rima, to knit his lines to his predecessor’s. For both poets the sunlight is better understood as starlight, a glow that breaks or lifts the darkness without banishing it.
Dylan Thomas captures this paradox too in his famous elegy for his father, ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’:
Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night. . . . Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
For all that Thomas urges his father to resist the dying of the light, the forms of light that he invokes are intermittent ones, lightning and meteors. The ‘wise’ men ‘know dark is right’, the ‘grave’ ones, their death already accomplished in that ambiguous word, see with ‘blinding sight’. Theirs is the light of vision. Just as Dante could neither look away from the ‘Great Light’ nor describe it, Heaney cannot say ‘what the mind needs told’. They are smitten by something sudden and inexpressible.
Call it insight or inspiration, it is a glimpse of truth, however you choose to understand that. For the artist or writer it is the spark that ignites the work, imagination and intellect must do the rest. The spark is precious for being fleeting. It becomes a miner’s light for the artist digging into the recesses of memory and the subconscious, like the beam that enters the chamber at Newgrange. In his original poem Heaney brings Dante into dialogue with T.S. Eliot and the sixteenth century Anglican bishop, Lancelot Andrewes, writing, ‘Who dares say “love” at this cold coming?’ The famous opening lines of Eliot’s ‘Journey of the Magi’ come from a sermon by Andrewes:
‘A cold coming we had of it Just the worst time of the year For a journey, and such a long journey: The ways deep and the weather sharp, The very dead of winter.’ [1]
Death is the ultimate mystery, and as Bacon pointed out being also inevitable it is eternally fascinating to us, as is the possibility that there is light at the end of that tunnel or passage. In his revised version of ‘A Dream of Solstice’, Heaney removes the mystical, transcendent elements of the original to end simply with the lines:
. . . holding its candle Under the rock-piled roof and the loam above.
The line strikes me as a dead end for the poem which had previously closed thus:
. . . to hold its candle
Inside the cosmic hill. Who dares say “love”
At this cold coming? Who would not dare say it?
Is the moved wheel that the poet spoke of,
The star pivot? Life’s Perseid in the ashpit
Of the dead? Like his, my speech cannot
Tell what the mind needs told: an infant tongue
Milky with breast milk would be more articulate. The final image, echoing Dante’s lines is more in tune with the significance of the solstice being one of birth and new life feeling its way towards expression. The sun reaches underground to nourish the soil, the spark of insight reaches into emotion and imagination to express the new and ineffable. The reader opens the book to enter another space and maybe emerge with a new insight.
[1] I am grateful to Jeanette Winterson for pointing out this connection in her T.S. Eliot Lecture at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, Sunday, December 18, 2023.
For images and more detail of the winter solstice in Newgrange see: Winter Solstice at Newgrange.
Thank you for reading What’s the Story? I look forward to your feedback and comments on this and any other newsletters in the series. As we are at the end of the year and face new beginnings I would be glad to get ideas for future issues of What’s the Story?
All good wishes for the holiday season and the new year.
It's a fascinating connection isn't it? Winterson also quoted Eliot describing the writing of the poem. He had recently converted to Anglicanism. On coming home from Sunday service he sat down with a half-bottle of gin and began to write the poem. By lunchtime both were finished!
Thank you!