In drear nighted December Summary & Analysis
by John Keats

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The Full Text of “In drear nighted December”

1In drear nighted December

2Too happy, happy tree

3Thy Branches ne'er remember

4Their green felicity—

5The north cannot undo them

6With a sleety whistle through them

7Nor frozen thawings glew them

8From budding at the prime—

9In drear nighted December

10Too happy happy Brook

11Thy bubblings ne'er remember

12Apollo's Summer look

13But with a sweet forgetting

14They stay their crystal fretting

15Never never petting

16About the frozen time—

17Ah! would 'twere so with many

18A gentle girl and boy—

19But were there ever any

20Writh'd not of passed joy:

21The feel of not to feel it

22When there is none to heal it

23Nor numbed sense to steel it

24Was never said in rhyme—

  • “In drear nighted December” Introduction

    • "In drear nighted December" is an early work by the English Romantic poet John Keats. The poem's speaker looks at an icy midwinter landscape with envy. Though the trees and waters are frozen stiff, the speaker argues, they're lucky: those trees can't remember a time when they were warm and alive. The human heart, on the other hand, can count on no such "sweet forgetting," but remembers the good times—agonizingly—even after they're long gone. Keats wrote this poem in December 1817, when he was only 22 years old. It was never published in his lifetime; it was first printed in The Literary Gazette in 1829, eight years after his death.

  • “In drear nighted December” Summary

    • In the dark nights of December—oh, lucky tree—your branches don't remember what it was like to be happily green. The north wind can't spoil them with its icy breath, nor can the frost stop them from budding again when spring comes.

      In the dark nights of December—oh, you lucky stream—your waters don't remember how the sun god gazed on them in the summer. Instead, in blissful ignorance, they hold still in crystalline patterns, never complaining about being frozen.

      Oh, if only it were the same for many a sweet young woman or man. But has anyone ever not writhed in pain over a lost joy? The feeling of not feeling that joy, when there's no way to make it better and no way to numb your suffering, can't be put into words.

  • “In drear nighted December” Themes

    • Theme Memory and the Pain of Loss

      Memory and the Pain of Loss

      The speaker of “In drear nighted December” looks with envy upon frozen winter trees and streams. The natural world might turn lifeless and cold in winter, the speaker reflects, but at least it doesn’t know it—and neither does it remember the time it was warm and alive. People, by contrast, enjoy no such fortunate oblivion in their own “frozen time[s]” of grief and pain. Perhaps the worst part of suffering a loss, this poem suggests, is enduring tormenting memories of the happiness that’s gone.

      When winter comes and everything that was once lively seems to freeze to death, the natural world enjoys a “sweet forgetting.” A tree’s bare winter branches “ne’er remember / Their green felicity”; they have no memory of being happily leafy. Nor does a brook “pet[]” (or fuss) about being frozen solid. The trees and the waters simply sit there under the frost, unaware that anything was ever different.

      Humanity, the speaker observes, doesn’t enjoy that same privilege. Who in the world, the speaker asks, has ever “writh’d not of passed joy”? That is, who has ever escaped writhing in the pain of loss, remembering what they once had “when there is none to heal it,” when nothing can bring back what’s gone? Grief, for human beings, is unavoidable.

      In this vision, loss in itself isn’t the source of the worst suffering: memory is. The “feel of not to feel it”—the awareness that you’ve lost a joy, the memory of what that joy was like—is what’s painful beyond words, this speaker feels; it was “never said in rhyme,” not even in this very poem.

      Perhaps the poem even hints that memory makes the pain of loss linger. While the ice can’t stop the tree from “budding” again when the spring comes, grief doesn’t “heal” so easily or punctually. Through memory, the ghosts of what you’ve lost can go on haunting you across the seasons of your life.

    • Theme Nature’s Constancy vs. Humanity’s Unpredictability

      Nature’s Constancy vs. Humanity’s Unpredictability

      The speaker of Keats's poem regrets that the human heart doesn’t work like the seasons do. While winter is an ancient symbol of grief and loss, and spring of hope and rebirth, that symbolism only works up to a point: human emotions aren’t so reliable as nature’s cycles. Spring can be counted on to renew icy trees and frozen streams, but a grieving heart might never fully defrost.

      The frozen trees and brooks of winter, the speaker observes, are “happy” (that is, lucky) not just because they don’t know that they’re frozen, but because their “frozen time” ends on a schedule. A leafless tree need only wait until spring and it’s time for “budding” again to regain its “green felicity”; a stream’s cheery “bubblings” will return as soon as the sun rolls round into the right place.

      The movements of the human heart, alas, aren’t so predictable. Certainly a person can endure an icy metaphorical winter of loss, grief, and suffering. But there’s no telling when—or if—a spring of relief and renewed happiness will come. Sometimes, the speaker says, there is “none to heal it”: some wounds never close. And even those wounds that can heal don’t heal to a schedule. Time might help to soften grief, but one can’t just point at a calendar and say, “At least I know I’ll feel better by April!”

      Nature, in other words, might provide some handy symbols for emotions—but the comparison only goes so far. The human heart is an ecosystem of its own, and its rhythms aren’t steady, cyclical, and predictable as nature’s are.

  • Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “In drear nighted December”

    • Lines 1-4

      In drear nighted December
      Too happy, happy tree
      Thy Branches ne'er remember
      Their green felicity—

      “In drear nighted December” begins in the darkest part of the year. It's not just winter, but December in particular, the month of the longest night—a “drear,” gloomy, dark time indeed. Out of the midst of this darkness, the poem’s speaker makes a wistful apostrophe to a leafless tree:

      Too happy, happy tree
      Thy Branches ne'er remember
      Their green felicity—

      This tree, in other words, is much luckier than it knows. (“Happy” here means “fortunate” as much as “cheerful.”) It might be frozen stiff—but that just doesn’t bother it. Why? Because it has no memory. It can’t recall the “green felicity”—the leafy joy—of summer. Losing its leaves thus makes no difference to these “branches”; whatever consciousness they had of their leaves fell away when the leaves did.

      To the speaker, this “happy, happy” forgetfulness—and notice the yearning epizeuxis—sounds wonderful. But there’s an implied juxtaposition here: clearly, the speaker enjoys no such lucky oblivion when they lose something. This will be a poem, not just about grief, but about the particular pain of having, losing, and remembering.

      Winter is an ancient symbol for death, grief, and loss, and the speaker will draw on all those old ideas here. But rather than reaching for the good old pathetic fallacy, personifying nature and using an iced-over tree as a symbol for an iced-over heart, this poem's speaker will insist that the world's seasons and the heart's seasons don't work in at all the same way.

    • Lines 5-8

      The north cannot undo them
      With a sleety whistle through them
      Nor frozen thawings glew them
      From budding at the prime—

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    • Lines 9-16

      In drear nighted December
      Too happy happy Brook
      Thy bubblings ne'er remember
      Apollo's Summer look
      But with a sweet forgetting
      They stay their crystal fretting
      Never never petting
      About the frozen time—

    • Lines 17-20

      Ah! would 'twere so with many
      A gentle girl and boy—
      But were there ever any
      Writh'd not of passed joy:

    • Lines 21-24

      The feel of not to feel it
      When there is none to heal it
      Nor numbed sense to steel it
      Was never said in rhyme—

  • “In drear nighted December” Symbols

    • Symbol Winter

      Winter

      This poem's "drear nighted" winter is a symbol of loss and pain. When the ice closes around the trees and streams, the speaker observes, they're lucky: within their frosty prisons, they can't remember what it was like not to be frozen stiff. When icy pain visits the human heart, on the other hand, people suffer both the chill of grief and the stab of memory, which reminds them that they once enjoyed warm, summery happiness.

      But the speaker also implicitly questions this classic seasonal symbolism. Winter, after all, can be counted on to go away on a fairly regular schedule. Grief, however, hangs around; it might soften with time, but then again, it might not.

  • “In drear nighted December” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

    • Apostrophe

      In an apostrophe to a frozen tree, the speaker tells it that it’s “too happy, happy”—that is, that it’s so lucky. That’s because its frozen “branches ne’er remember / Their green felicity”: they can’t recall what it was like to be lush with leaves. This apostrophe stresses the distinction between a tree’s experience and a person’s: when a person loses something, the speaker laments, they remember all too well what it was like to have it.

      Poetically speaking, this apostrophe is pretty novel. Rather than conventionally personifying the tree—say, by presenting it shivering in the winter cold and thus making it into a fellow-sufferer, a symbol of human feeling—the speaker insists that a tree’s experience is simply different from a person’s (and enviably so). This speaker doesn’t make the old Romantic move of turning to nature for consolation and wisdom. Rather, they reach out imaginatively to nature only to discover an alien “sweet forgetting” they only wish they could share.

      An apostrophe to the “happy happy Brook” works similarly, making the brook seem remote and strange even as the speaker talks to it directly. As blithely unaware of winter as the tree is, the brook “never never pet[s]” (that is, fusses) about the “frozen time.”

      These apostrophes might invite readers to consider whether the tree and the brook feel anything at all, ever. If they don’t feel pain in winter, do they feel joy when Apollo (the Greek sun god) shines his “Summer look” down upon them again? Or is their happiness, their good luck, simply in a uniformly “numbed sense,” an inability to feel anything? To this dejected speaker, nature’s numbness might sound like a pretty good deal compared to the pain of grief.

      Rather than bringing nature consolingly closer to the speaker, then, the poem’s apostrophes emphasize the distance between feeling humanity and insensible nature.

    • Allusion

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    • Juxtaposition

    • Repetition

  • “In drear nighted December” Vocabulary

    Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

    • Drear nighted
    • Happy
    • Ne'er
    • Felicity
    • Glew
    • At the prime
    • Apollo
    • Fretting
    • Petting
    • Would 'twere so
    • Writh'd
    • Steel
    Drear nighted
    • That is, dreary-nighted: having nights that are dark, cold, and gloomy.

  • Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “In drear nighted December”

    • Form

      "In drear nighted December" uses a form of Keats's own invention:

      • Each of the poem's three eight-line stanzas (or octaves) is written in short lines of iambic trimeter—lines of three iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in "A gen- | tle girl | and boy."
        • Copious feminine endings make even these crisp, brief lines feel sad. The extra syllable at the end of "The feel | of not | to feel it," for instance, seems to hang its head.
      • Each stanza uses an ABABCCCD rhyme scheme, a pattern of rhyme that splits each octave into a pair of four-line sections: the singsongy ABAB and the insistent CCCD.
        • This division captures the shape of the speaker's sorrow: sometimes soft and wistful, sometimes driving like a nail.

      Combined with echoing repetitions, this form makes the poem sounds rather like a folk song, a universal tale of grief. Rather than making the traditional symbolic choice here, though—using the pathetic fallacy to suggest that nature grieves in winter just as people grieve their losses—this song drives a wedge between sad humanity and the unperturbed (if chilly) natural world.

    • Meter

      “In drear nighted December” is written in iambic trimeter. That means that each of its lines consists of three iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in line 2:

      Too hap- | py, hap- | py tree

      But there’s a wrinkle. Many lines—notably, the rhymed triplets that appear in each stanza—use what’s known as a feminine ending. That means there's an extra unstressed syllable at the end of a line, as in line 21:

      The feel | of not | to feel it

      That extra syllable creates a crestfallen, sinking rhythm, evoking the speaker’s defeated sense that emotional pain, unlike the winter, doesn’t melt away so surely as ice does.

      Notice that Keats often uses an old-fashioned poetic pronunciation of words that end in -ed here, giving them a full two syllables: "pass-ed," "numb-ed." If he doesn't want that extra syllable pronounced, he uses a contraction: "writh'd."

    • Rhyme Scheme

      The rhyme scheme of "In drear nighted December" runs as follows:

      ABABCCCD

      That movement from singsong, alternating ABAB passages into CCC triplets creates a mood of mingled melancholy and intensity: the speaker spends the first four lines of each stanza on a wistful sigh, then moves into an insistent statement of the way things are (or aren't) in this world.

      While the A, B, and C rhymes vary across the poem, the final D rhyme stays the same throughout: "prime," "time," and "rhyme," the closing words of each stanza, all chime with each other, linking the stanzas and giving the poem's last word a feeling of sad inevitability.

  • “In drear nighted December” Speaker

    • The poem's speaker is a sorrowful, world-weary, and anonymous voice. Less a character in the poem than a remote observer, this speaker nevertheless seems to have seen enough of life to know how grief works. In this, the speaker resembles the young Keats himself, who—by the time he wrote this poem—had lost both of his parents, and would soon lose a beloved brother, too.

      While plenty of Romantic speakers find consolation and divinity in the natural world (see Wordsworth's Immortality Ode for one important example), this poem's speaker can only look at the frozen trees and brooks with envy, longing for the "sweet forgetting" that lets them endure frost without suffering, wishing that feelings moved to as steady and predictable a rhythm as the seasons do.

      Perhaps there's some unspoken comfort in the thought that everyone suffers together, though. The speaker doesn't focus narrowly on personal suffering, but describes humanity's shared plight: everyone must endure "the feel of not to feel it," one time or another.

  • “In drear nighted December” Setting

    • The poem is set (and was written) in "drear nighted December," the darkest, coldest part of the year. Looking around at an icy landscape, the speaker sees and feels it vividly, hearing the "sleety whistle" of the north wind and observing the "crystal fretting" that patterns the iced-over stream. But they also see the ghosts of summer's "green felicity" in this lifeless world, remembering the stream's "bubblings" even though the stream itself can't.

      The setting isn't just a literal, particular December, but a symbolic drear night of the soul, a time of mourning over "passed joy" and keenly suffering "the feel of not to feel it." Trees don't remember being leafy when they're leafless, but, as the speaker laments, the human heart can rely on no such "sweet forgetting" when it's grieving.

  • Literary and Historical Context of “In drear nighted December”

      Literary Context

      John Keats (1795-1821) is often seen as an archetypal Romantic poet: a dreamy, sensuous soul who died tragically young. But Keats was also a vigorous, funny writer, a working-class kid making inroads into a literary scene dominated by aristocratic figures like Lord Byron. He died obscure and poor, never knowing that he would become one of the world's best-loved poets. But he had a quiet faith in his own genius: in an early letter, he once declared, "I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death."

      Keats was also among a notable crowd of English poets during his lifetime: he met or corresponded with most of his fellow Romantics. However, he never got too close to any of them. As a young writer, he was inspired by William Wordsworth, the granddaddy of English Romanticism—but was dismayed to find him pompous and conservative in person. ("Mr. Wordsworth," Wordsworth's wife Mary reprimanded the enthusiastic young Keats, "is never interrupted.") He had just one conversation with Samuel Taylor Coleridge (which seems to have felt more like a whirlwind than a friendly chat). And while Percy Shelley admired Keats's work, Keats never quite fell in with him and his elite clique; Byron, Shelley's close friend, was actively contemptuous of Keats. Keats's real circle was instead built from earthier London artists like Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt, and Benjamin Haydon.

      In spite of being something of an outsider in his time, Keats has indeed landed "among the English Poets" since his death. Ever since later Victorian writers like Tennyson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning resurrected his reputation, he's been one of the most beloved and influential of poets.

      Keats dashed this deceptively simple poem off in December 1817—a period when lots of new and important ideas were brewing for him, including his famous idea of "Negative Capability":

      [...] at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason [...]

      Ending with what can't be said, this little poem itself—never published in Keats's lifetime—feels rather negatively capable.

      Historical Context

      Over the 25 years of his short life, John Keats saw more than his share of loss and pain. His mother and father both died while he was only a child, leaving him and his siblings in the care of their grandparents—who shortly also died. Thereafter, the four surviving Keats kids (one further brother died in infancy) grew up under the guardianship of the unsympathetic and grasping Mr. Abbey, a businessman who didn't have much time for John's poetic ambitions.

      And this was only the beginning of Keats's troubles. When he wrote this poem in 1817, he couldn't know that he would soon have to nurse his beloved youngest brother Tom through a fatal case of tuberculosis, nor that his brother George would soon emigrate to America (a great and perilous distance in the 19th century). Nor could he know that he himself would contract tuberculosis and die only a few years later in 1821—a cruelly short time after he became engaged to his beloved Fanny Brawne, the literal girl next door, for whom he fell hard.

      Keats approached his sufferings with preternatural wisdom and strength. In a letter he wrote to George in 1819, he described life and all its pains as a "Vale of Soul-Making":

      I will call the world a School instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read— I will call the human heart the horn Book used in that School— and I will call the Child able to read, the Soul made from that School and its hornbook. Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul? A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways!

      In other words, while the young Keats laments the intractability of grief in this poem, a slightly older Keats reads such grief as a "necessary" part of life, an experience that gives the soul itself its form and identity. More than that, he felt, art that engaged truthfully with suffering had the power to transform pain into beauty.

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