We’re got two performances of The Year’s Midnight in the coming week: on Thursday at the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama, and then on Monday at Shoreditch Church as part of the Spitalfields Festival, with the poems read by Simon Callow. It’s a celebration of the Winter Solstice, winter, the cold, the dark, moonlight and the stars.
December 21st is the longest night of the year; the night we might fear that the sun won’t return and that the days will continue to become shorter and shorter, until we are left in a permanent darkness.
The sun didn’t rise above the horizon until gone eight this morning, and disappeared again at four in the afternoon – ‘the world’s whole sap is sunk’, as John Donne puts it.
Our programme celebrates this unique night in words and music; to explore and evoke the particular mood and atmosphere that this night has and it’s place in our psyche, collective and individual. The inspiration came from Donne’s great poem and led outward into thoughts of winter, night, moonlight, sleep, cold & darkness.
Darkness provokes thoughts of death, and both Donne and Henry Vaughan make this link, though their conclusions are very different. John Woolrich also paints a picture out of the darkest of colours, while Dowland inhabits a weeping black marble space, a tomb awaiting death. And Shakespeare, a near contemporary of Dowland, links the winter of the world to his own winter, decay and death.
But night, though dark, is illumined with spectral light from stars and moon. Vaughan’s Midnight suggests a transcendental light from heaven, while Edward Thomas is out in the dark night, and finds a unity between him, star, wind and deer. Li Po sees moonlight at the foot of his bed, which reminds him of home; yet Sylvia Plath’s moon is part of an horrific vision, painted in white, black and blue.
A star it was that led the Magi to Bethlehem, where they find the Christ-child in his mother’s arms. Eliot’s Magi ask if it was a birth or a death they came to see, while Byrd’s nativity scene is untroubled by such questions. Auden’s Mary is troubled as she tries to calm her child, and she wonders when his sorrowful journey will begin. She urges her child to sleep, and to dream. For both Keats & Fletcher, sleep is also a balm, a refuge from daylight woes.
The cold of winter is what drives the startling imagery of Ted Hughes poem, including the, for us, extraordinary simile of ‘the butterfly in its mummy like a viol in its case.’
And Hardy paints a frosty picture rent by the sound of a thrush, breaking the evening silence.
Finally, it’s left to Philip Larkin to suggest the coming of a more hopeful season.
