In Drear Nighted December
In drear nighted December,
Too happy, happy tree,
Thy branches ne’er remember
Their green felicity —
The north cannot undo them
With a sleety whistle through them
Nor frozen thawings glue them
From budding at the prime.
In drear nighted December,
Too happy, happy brook,
Thy bubblings ne’er remember
Apollo’s summer look;
But with a sweet forgetting,
They stay their crystal fretting,
Never, never petting
About the frozen time.
Ah! would ’twere with so many
A gentle girl and boy —
But were there ever any
Writh’d not of passing joy?
The feel of not to feel it,
Where there is none to heal it
Nor numbed sense to steel it,
Was 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 decided it was about a Christmas tree, and, although I liked difficult poems with words long and strange enough to get lost in, I was delighted by the sudden appearance of the familiar. And here was an insight, in the second line, which had occurred to me as well: the tree was “too happy” in its domestic splendour. I was familiar with the sorry end of the brilliantly tinselled, slowly dying tree. I liked the repetition of “happy”, that note of warning. To be “too happy” was to ask for trouble. Keats was on my wavelength.
It turned out I had been too happy with the poem when, halfway through stanza one, the hoped-for Christmas tree disappeared, and I landed in a very different scene. I was further disoriented by the sudden appearance of a brook, and, oh dear, a girl and boy in boring love. More patient today, I’ve worked out what a fine little poem-song this is, and how freshly 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 opening stanzas one and two. Keats’s diction throughout is inventive: he makes bold use of gerunds, or “verbal nouns”, such as “thawings”, “bubblings”, “forgetting”, “fretting”. Each stanza encloses a triad of end-rhymes, consisting, in the first and third, of verb-and-object (“undo them”, “through them”, “glue them” and “feel it”, “heal it” “steel it”). The energy of the rhyme-scheme springs from folk song and folk-speech foundations.
Description is marvellously compressed in the “sleety whistle” of the wind in the trees branches, and the “frozen thawings” which almost contain a season-change. When December’s dreariness deepens, after a brief temperature rise, the re-frozen ice-melt fails to “glue” the branches and prevent their budding. In the next stanza, there’s more ice, and, again, an untroubled response, this time from the brook. The sun is presented in a classical figure with a modern edge – “Apollo’s summer look”. But “a sweet forgetting” is all the brook’s “bubblings” know of the god’s earlier attention. In “frettings” there’s both anxious movement and transformation into the stilled fretwork of ice. The rhyme pattern urges forward the brook’s characterisation thanks to another unexpected word choice, “petting”. It suggests disappointment and the resulting “petulance” or “getting in a pet” – a childish response the brook entirely resists in enduring the absence of the love-gaze in this newly “frozen time”.
Having fixed the almost druggy contentment of the brook, the poem easily moves on to the contrast in human affairs. Stanza three succeeds in resisting easy romanticism in depicting the separated girl and boy. In most published versions, Keats avoids grammatical convention when he asks, “But were there ever any / Writh’d not of passing joy?” To “writhe of” rather than “at” the “passing joy” deepens the pain, relates the love-suffering to the kind of physical illness we may “die of” and which makes the whole body twist and turn.
With the attention-stopping “The feel of not to feel it”, Keats brilliantly extends the idea of a thawing which refreezes into the contrast between memory and experience: “to feel” is to remember and imagine “feeling” too clearly, and “not to feel it” is complete and ineluctable negation. There is no escape from the real, present loss of feeling. So now it’s clear why the tree and the brook were accounted “too happy”: Keats has been speaking all the while for the separated girl and boy. Despite the echo of Dante, that “there is no greater pain, than to remember happy times in misery …” (voiced by Francesca in the Inferno, Canto Five) the claim that these particular sensations of the lovers’ plight haven’t yet been “said in rhyme” may not be overdramatic. If “rhyme” is interpreted as the homelier kind of lyric or song, Keats’s fresh and nuanced perception has extended the genre – with or without the ghost of that too-happy Christmas tree I first imagined.
