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In Drear Nighted December
On a dark December night,
Too happy, happy tree,
Your branches never remember
Their green happiness –
The North cannot cancel them
With slushy playing through them
Nor do frozen thaws stick them together
From budding into bloom.
On a dark December night,
Too happy, happy brook,
Your gurgles I never remember
Apollo’s Summer Vision;
But with sweet oblivion,
They remain crystal clear,
Never, ever caressing
For the frozen weather.
Ah! there would be so many
Gentle girl and boy –
But were there any
Writhd not of passing joy?
The feeling of not feeling it
Where there is no one to heal him
Nor numbed sense to temper him,
Never said in rhyme.
Written in early December 1817, John Keats’s In Drear Nighted December was one of the first poems I read as a child. I immediately thought it was a Christmas tree, and although I like difficult poems with long enough and strange words to get lost in, I was delighted by the sudden appearance of the familiar. And here’s an insight in the second line that also occurred to me: the tree was “too happy” in its homely glow. I was familiar with the sad end of the brilliantly veneered, slowly dying tree. I liked the repetition of “happy”, that note of warning. Being “too happy” was asking for trouble. Keats was on my wave.
It turned out that I was too happy with the poem when, halfway through the first stanza, the expected Christmas tree disappeared and I found myself in a completely different scene. I was further disoriented by the sudden appearance of a stream and, oh dear, a girl and a boy in boring love. More patient today, I realized what a nice little poem this is and how fresh it says what it says.
The title lines, first: the lack of a hyphen between “drear” and “nighted” adds to the slow weight of the words that begin the first and second stanzas. Keats’s diction is inventive throughout: he makes bold use of gerunds or ‘verbal nouns’ such as ‘thaw’, ‘bubbling’, ‘forgetting’, ‘irritation’. Each stanza comprises a triad of end rhymes consisting of the first and third parts of a verb and an object (“undo them”, “through them”, “stick them” and “feel it”, “heal it” “steel”). The energy of the rhyme scheme springs from the folk-song and folk-speech basis.
The description is wonderfully compressed into the “sludgy whistling” of the wind in the tree branches and the “frozen thaws” that almost contain a change of season. When the December gloom deepens, after a brief rise in temperature, the refrozen ice melt fails to “glue” the branches and prevent them from budding. In the next stanza there is more ice and again a seamless response, this time from the stream. The sun is presented in a classic figure with a modern edge – the “summer look of Apollo”. But “sweet forgetfulness” is all that the “babbling” of the stream knows of the god’s previous attention. In “frettings” there is both an unsettling movement and a transformation in the still carving of ice. The rhyme pattern prompts the characterization of flow thanks to another unexpected word choice, “caress.” It suggests frustration and the resulting “annoyance” or “pet-taking”—a childish response that the stream completely resists to bear the lack of the loving gaze in this new “frozen time.”
After fixing the almost narcotic contentment of the flow, the poem easily moves to the contrast in human affairs. The third stanza manages to resist facile romanticism in depicting the separated girl and boy. In most published versions, Keats eschews grammatical convention when he asks, “But was there ever / Writh’d not from fleeting joy?” To “wring from” rather than “of” “transient joy” deepens the pain, connects the suffering of love with the kind of physical sickness from which we can “die” and which makes the whole body twist and turn.
With the arresting “Feeling of Not Feeling,” Keats brilliantly expands on the idea of unfreezing, which refreezes in the contrast between memory and experience: “to feel” is to remember and imagine “feeling” too clearly, and “not to you feel” is a complete and inevitable negation. There is no escaping the real, present loss of feeling. So it is now clear why the tree and the stream were considered “too happy”: Keats all the time talks about the separated girl and boy. Despite Dante’s echo that “there is no greater pain than to remember happy times in misfortune…” (voiced by Francesca in “Hell”, track five) claim that these specific feelings about the lovers’ plight have not yet been “spoken in rhyme” may not be overdramatic. If “rhyme” is interpreted as the homelier kind of lyric or song, Keats’s fresh and nuanced take expanded the genre—with or without the specter of that all-too-happy Christmas tree I originally envisioned.
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