… (here’s a somewhat eccentric version – there are many versions of this beautiful song on YouTube) is better known than his poem Now Winter Nights Enlarge.
But thinking as I am – as so many are – on Christopher Hitchens, it seems a good poem to dedicate to his memory.
As always I’ll interrupt its lines with my comments. Go to the link on its title to see (and hear) the poem without my messing about.
Now Winter Nights Enlarge
[The title’s a little poem in itself. Is it in the imperative? Is it a command to us to draw out or in some way enrich long dark winter nights — and by extension, to make the most of life’s pleasures even when things get dark and cold? Or is it a simple observation – the perception of a person in the midst of the most intense earthly darkness (both winter and night) that winter nights are long?]
Now winter nights enlarge
This number of their hours;
[The hours of darkness increase during the winter. And yet the word is enlarge, not increase, suggesting not a receding from richness, but possibly a gain in it… And of course the word numb echoes inside of number and has us shivering with thoughts of the very coldest hours of the night. ]
And clouds their storms discharge
Upon the airy towers.
[Here the poetic word, the enlarge, is airy. Oh, and towers. Because are the towers rooftops that we can barely see (airy) amid the night and the stormy clouds? Or are the towers non-stormy clouds, suffering a blanketing by darker clouds? In any case, at this early point in the poem things are looking pretty dark. We’re getting a conventional reading of wintry nights as a figure for our numbered days, the darkening of our lives.]
Let now the chimneys blaze
And cups o’erflow with wine,
Let well-tuned words amaze
With harmony divine.
[Whoa. Talk about switching the lights on. The natural world’s deathly, but that only intensifies our human countercurrents, our defiant impulse to electrify a world on the blink. Light the fires, break out the wine – use the uninhabitability of the natural world to elaborate a joyous, internal, human habitation whose most essential, most joyous component is language.]
Now yellow waxen lights
Shall wait on honey love
While youthful revels, masques, and courtly sights
Sleep’s leaden spells remove.
[Excited by the flame’s brilliance, the wine’s fire, and fiery eloquence, we now have only to anticipate candle-lit lovemaking.]
This time doth well dispense
With lovers’ long discourse;
Much speech hath some defense,
Though beauty no remorse.
[It’s just as well that the nights are too cold for extensive verbal foreplay; let’s get to it and warm ourselves at the simple visceral beauty of each other’s body.]
All do not all things well:
Some measures comely tread,
Some knotted riddles tell,
Some poems smoothly read.
The summer hath his joys,
And winter his delights;
Though love and all his pleasures are but toys
They shorten tedious nights.
[Not everyone’s good at everything – talents seems parceled out, with some able to dance, some to tell stories, some to recite poems… Yet the beauty of winter (the poem perhaps suggests) is the way it perforce throws us together around the warming fire, where our human capacities are communally, richly, displayed and shared. Winter is when we pleasure each other in an unusual display of generosity and disinhibition (think of the last scene of Babette’s Feast); this is its delight. At these concluding lines of the poem, we circle around to the original use of the word enlarge and explain it: winter’s hours enlarge by prompting us to shorten (nice poetic paradox there) for one another the tedium of a dull life.]