In drear-nighted December Lyrics
Too happy, happy tree
Thy branches ne'er remember
Their green felicity:
The north cannot undo them
With a sleety whistle through them;
Nor frozen thawings glue them
From budding at the prime
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
Ah! would 'twere so with many
A gentle girl and boy!
But were there ever any
Writhed not at passed joy?
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.
About
The Romantic Poets
Keats was one of the ‘big six’ Romantic Poets, the others being Shelley, Worsdsworh, Coleridge, Blake and Byron.
A tenet of Romantic poetry is its focus on nature, on the supernatural and man’s insignificance in comparison to the natural world. It was a turbulent time when the Napoleonic Wars had not long ended and Europe was in a state of flux and unrest. In England the infamous Peterloo Massacre had occurred in August 1819, when cavalry charged into a crowd demonstrating against poor economic conditions and lack of parliamentary representation in the north of England..
In this beautiful, neatly constructed poem, Keats praises nature, even in the depth of winter; a typical feature of the Romantic poets and Keats in particular.
Structure
The poem comprises three stanzas of eight lines each. There is a complex structure which creates a song-like rhythm. The first four lines of each stanza have 7,6,7,6 syllables— a quatrain with an ABAB rhyme scheme — followed by lines with 7,7,7 and 6 syllables each and a CCCE rhyme scheme. The clever feat that Keats pulls off is that the last line of each stanza rhymes; ‘prime’, ‘time’ and ‘rhyme’. The effect is subtle and gives the poem coherence, while the reader may not be aware of how it is achieved.
Language and Imagery
The voice is that of a third person narrator, whom we can take to be the poet. Only the emotive, exclamatory ‘Ah’ in the third stanza gives a hint of a personal involvement. Keats uses sensuous imagery in this, as in all his poems. He uses adjectives to depict a silent frozen night in which a tree and a brook are ‘happy’ because they are ignorant of the beauty of the Spring time. The tree cannot be damaged with a chilly-sounding ‘sleety whistle’. The brook’s bubbles which ‘stay their crystal fretting’ suggest glittering ice; the girl and boy ‘writhed’ with the thought of ‘passed joy’,
Q&A
Find answers to frequently asked questions about the song and explore its deeper meaning