Renaissance
EASTER 2026
Tuesday 12 May, 5.15 in GR06/7Gordon Teskey (Harvard University)
Title: Dark Energy: John Donne’s Saint Lucy Nocturnal
The most challenging of Donne’s lyric poems, “A Nocturnal Upon Saint Lucy’s Day”, is set at a boundary moment between worlds: at midnight, winter solstice, 1617, four months after the death of the poet’s wife. Donne strove to come to terms with this loss twice before: in Holy Sonnet 17, where his wife is inaccessibly in Heaven; and in the Latin inscription for her grave marker, where his ashes join hers in a “new marriage.” In the Saint Lucy Nocturnal, the poet raises the Parmenidean question of being and not-being by continually and ingeniously affirming his nonentity: “I am by her death … Of the first nothing, the elixir grown.” Are such statements merely nonsense, though powerful expressions of feeling? Do they have a further purpose? The key is in the poet’s reference to them as preparation. I contend we may see them as a meditative practice akin to the Buddhist notions of nothingness and no-self, a thinning-toward-nothing. The poet prepares to enter a third space between life and death, one where his wife already “enjoys her long night’s festival.”
