Long Dark Nights and Shining Stars

Nick Cave, T. S. Eliot and Medieval Poetry

Epiphany is one of my favourite days of the year. It celebrates the end of Christmas, as well as the story of the three Magi, Jesus’ baptism and the wedding at Cana. I love this day because of its many rich layers of meaning, and also because I adore the story of the Magi.

Michael Damaskinos - Adoration of the Kings

It is such a strange story! Who are the Magi and where do they come from? How do they know a star will lead them to the king of the Jews? How is it possible for a star to stop over a certain place?

Similar to the star of Bethlehem, the idea of a little light amidst the darkness has been a powerful image to me over the past months. These months have been some of the hardest of my life. Some mornings I would wake up, feeling like I was being strangled by shadowy hands of despair. But I imagined myself grasping towards a small flickering light in the distance. I saw myself wading through bogs of thick, black, oily depression, towards this light. Every day I would try and nourish myself with beauty goodness and truth: praying, listening to podcasts, and surrounding myself with loved ones. One day, I drew this picture to try and represent how I felt:

Even when the darkness felt all-enveloping, I had to have faith in the light, even when it was only small and flickering, and the notion of the rising sun felt impossible. I wonder if that’s how the wise men felt when they were searching for the Christ child. T. S. Eliot imagined their despair in his poem, Journey of the Magi (which you should read in full, here).

‘A cold coming we had of it,

Just the worst time of the year

For a journey, and such a long journey:

The ways deep and the weather sharp,

The very dead of winter.’

[. . . ]

A hard time we had of it.

At the end we preferred to travel all night,

Sleeping in snatches,

With the voices singing in our ears, saying

That this was all folly.

Eliot layers the images compounding darkness, cold, winter, sleep and night-time, emphasising that this is a metaphorical death for the wise men. The poem breaks the string of alliterative images with the piercing fear, “that this was all folly.” Isn’t this story of battling the dark with a fear of meaninglessness a familiar one to us all?

Similar ideas are echoed in Nick cave’s 2024 song, Long Dark Night

I was long inside a dream, I could not get loose

I will tell you of it, although there is little use

To tell a dream when dreaming is all you ever do

But things were not so good, I can’t make light of it

My poor soul, it was having a dark night of it

A long night, a week, maybe a year

Maybe a long dark night is coming down

Maybe a long dark night is coming down

The motif of night, along with the phrase “dark night of it,” syntactically reflecting Eliot’s repeated syntax in “a cold coming we had of it” and “a hard time we had of it,” creates a link between these two works. Moreover, the motif of dreaming recollects the prophetic dreams of the Magi, making it, I think, an appropriate song for epiphany.

The more direct reference in Cave’s song, however, is to the notion of the dark night of the soul, coined by Saint John of the Cross in the sixteenth century. In Saint John’s poem, he too describes a long dark night. But he describes the night as a “happy lot,” as the darkness draws him closer to his beloved, who represents Christ in the poem. The only light is the burning of the poet’s heart for his (or her) lover. This light, he says, guides him “more surely than the noonday sun”, much like, in my opinion, the guiding light of the star of Bethlehem. Ultimately the poem sees the long dark night, not merely as a time of despair, but instead a purifying crucible, through which one can reach a more intimate relationship with God.

John of the cross, 1656

We see echoes of the poem in Nick Cave’s song when he sings, that “the man . . . leant down and stuck me with his long trailing hair,” reflecting Saint John’s:

As His hair floated in the breeze

That from the turret blew,

He struck me on the neck

With His gentle hand,

And all sensation left me.

Through Nick Cave’s reference to Saint John of the cross, we see a glimmer of hope in his song. This long dark night is not meaningless. It is not all folly.

The importance of the long dark night is also illuminated at the end of Eliot’s poem when the wise men ask:

This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

Thus, Eliot, through his Magi, sees the death as something intrinsically connected to birth. In fact, he seems to see the deathlike process of stripping everything back to its bare bones as more powerful than the moment at which he sees Christ, which he describes merely as “satisfactory.” He suggests ultimately that long, dark nights are necessary for our own spiritual rebirths.

So, this Epiphany, I am thinking about the power of long dark nights. In my own life, they have paradoxically been the most harrowing times of my life, whilst also being the most transformative. And more, if you are going through a dark night of the soul, I want to encourage you to keep seeking the light, even if it is a faint flicker.

Finally, I will leave you with a poem I started, but haven’t had time to finish. I hope to quadruple its length and illustrate it eventually. I hope you like it! And since it’s a draft, I’m open to feedback!

Lucia in the Dark

In the early hours of the morning,

The heavy breath of Darkness drifted by,

It woke Lucia coldly without warning,

It whispered softly, “don’t you want to die?”

-

The next thing, arms of avarice were clawing,

Tugging at her hair with beady eyes,

They coiled around her face with gentle gnawing

And pulled at her with unrelenting cries,

-

“you’d better join us down here in the howling.

It’s better here, you don’t even have to try!”

They pulled her deeper into pits of growling,

“it’s exhausting, we know, living way up high.”

-

Then Lucia felt its scales as satin,

She relaxed herself and didn’t try to fight,

Slowly she allowed herself to flatten,

Thinking, “after all, maybe it is right.”

-

But then Lucia saw it in the darkness:

a flickering and holy little light.

It grew and it surprised her with its starkness.

Maybe in its brightness she could fight?

-

She reached her arm and found it ‘tween her fingers

And she pulled herself right up into the night

Beneath her, yowls of darkness dankly lingered

Sputtering and spitting cursèd blight