December Stillness

 December Stillness - a post by Meg Crane

 

December stillness, teach me through your trees
That loom along the west, one with the land,
The veiled evangel of your mysteries.

While nightfall, sad and spacious, on the down
Deepens, and dusk imbues me where I stand,
With grave diminishings of green and brown,

Speak roofless Nature, your instinctive words;
And let me learn your secret from the sky,
Following a flock of steadfast journeying birds
In lone remote migration beating by.

December stillness, crossed by twilight roads,
Teach me to travel far and bear my loads.

 

       Collected Poems p.211. Composed December 1930; published January 1934 in The Spectator.

 

 

According to Jean Moorcroft Wilson, Sassoon wrote this at Wilsford, Stephen Tennant's house in Wiltshire, on Christmas Eve 1930. Although the relationship would not come to a decisive end for more than another year, it was already evident to Sassoon that it was falling apart, and that he could hang on to what was left of it only by sacrificing his own needs and serving Stephen's errant wishes.

 

As so often, Sassoon pictures himself as a solitary figure enclosed by his own loneliness. If the melancholy landscape in the poem is that of Wiltshire, it is also strongly reminiscent of the Kentish setting of the much earlier poem 'Together' ('Splashing along the boggy woods all day …) – another poem written in response to a lost love. The winter landscape reflects the speaker's sadness, but prompts him in some way to give himself up to whatever Nature can teach him, some wisdom which he believes to exist but cannot yet understand. The bare trees reach upwards to the 'roofless' sky: the image suggests in the first place dereliction and ruin – but something which is 'roofless' may also be limitless. The 'steadfast journeying' birds are travelling out of sight with a purpose which the speaker recognises though he cannot yet share it. 

There are other characteristic elements, familiar from the war poems. One such is the image of a road. In 'The Road' (CP p.32) and 'The Last Meeting' (p.35) - yet another lost-love poem - the speaker is passing along, or watching others pass along, a road which must lead somewhere, but to a destination we never see. Like most middle-class children of his generation, Sassoon was brought up on The Pilgrim's Progress, with its absorbing myth of a journey which goes on through darkness, danger and incomprehension, but which in the end leads through every danger and past every obstacle to a promised haven.

In the closing phrase 'bear my loads' we have another image of travelling and patient endurance, recalling the soldier-cum-Christ-figure in 'The Redeemer' ('Shouldering his load of planks, so hard to bear'). Although Sassoon's conversion still lay more than twenty years ahead, there is the religious imagery and vocabulary ('evangel' and 'mysteries' in line 3) and the invocation to some spiritual force, which recur in Sassoon's work all the way from 'Before Day' in 1908 ('Come in this hour to set my spirit free') to 'Prayer at Pentecost' in  1960 ('Spirit, who speak'st by silences, remake me'). As a soldier Sassoon was known for a courage of the reckless kind which earned him the nickname of 'Mad Jack' – but his poems more commonly celebrate the kind of courage which forces itself on in the belief, or hope, that there is some purpose and end to it all.

I am hoping to find other Sassoon poems which link to particular months of the year. This blog entry should have appeared last month, in December – my apologies, and I will try to move more synchronously next time!