If I do a search for poems with the word light in the title, I get 12,600 hits. For dark, I get 6,000. This doesn’t scratch the surface of how many times “light” appears buried within stanzas. Can it be that we poets, blackly contemplative as we’re perceived, are at least twice as obsessed with light as darkness?
After the leaves fall and days shorten, we begin to make our own light. Red and green and blue twinkle up and down my road, colored stars sprinkle rooftops of barns. We offer this glow to the silent animals below, the frogs tucked in leafy hibernations, cicadas tunneled down deep, cars that crunch by in the cold and faces in the cars we can’t see. People retreat into their houses, but the light says we are here. Waiting.
Some wait for the birth of the divine child, others for the return of the sun, as the winter solstice runs concurrently with the Christian holiday. Indeed, many of our Christian traditions like wreaths and mistletoe are borrowed from pre-Christian practices. Burning the Yule log is another shared tradition of light, belonging originally to the pagans who burned a large log over several nights when the northern pole tilted its farthest away from the sun.
Of course, in the Christian tradition there is the Star of Bethlehem, another light source. The star is mentioned only in the gospel of Matthew and as far as I know, the best science we have to explain the star is a planetary conjunction that occurred in 3 B.C., when Jupiter and Venus sat just 1/10th a degree apart in the dawn sky. That’s one-fifth the diameter of the full moon. For reference, the December 2020 conjunction between Jupiter and Saturn had an identical separation, seen in the evening sky.
But sometimes facts lag behind metaphor. It is the light itself, our stories, our legends, our myths, our liturgy, that unite us in our lonely corner of an immense void. It is the light that rages against its dying, the lamp unto my feet light, the light seeking light doth beguile light, the certain kind of light that’s never shone on me light, the when I consider how my light is spent light, and the light years away light. On his deathbed, the philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe called out, Mehr Licht!, or More light! Reported by his physician, then discredited, the words live on as impossibly, wonderfully true. When I call Merry Christmas to believers and non-believers alike, it’s this I mean.
Christmas Light
by May Sarton
When everyone had gone
I sat in the library
With the small silent tree,
She and I alone.
How softly she shone!
And for the first time then
For the first time this year,
I felt reborn again,
I knew love’s presence near.
Love distant, love detached
And strangely without weight,
Was with me in the night
When everyone had gone
And the garland of pure light
Stayed on, stayed on.
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