John Keats' poem, "In a drear-nighted December" dramatizes the constancy of things in nature-a tree and a brook-while showing how different the human heart behaves.
Each stanza of Keats’ poem consists of eight lines; the rime scheme is unique and must be counted over the entire poem to appreciate the technical skill employed: ABABCCCD AEACFFFD GHGHIIID.
The reader will note that the final words in each stanza rime, an unusual touch that enhances the mood of the poem by unifying its suggestions. The rhythm also contributes to the melancholy of the poem.
First Stanza: “In a drear-nighted December / Too happy, happy tree”
In the first stanza, the speaker addresses the situation of a “Too happy, happy tree.” He tells the tree that is does not remember summer when its leaves were green, but he refers to the branches as failing to remember their “green felicity.” Therefore, he is asserting that the leaves were the happiness of the branches, and now that they are gone, those branches do not remember them.
Then he remarks that no matter how cold it becomes, those branches will again begin their budding when spring comes. The cold “north cannot undo them,” and the ice that freezes them cannot destroy their creative abilities. Their happiness does not depend upon things they may lose.
Second Stanza: “In a drear-nighted December / Too happy, happy brook”
In the second stanza, the speaker addresses the frozen brook. He tells it that it too, like the tree, does not remember its better condition in summer. Like the tree, it is a “happy, happy brook.” The “bubblings” of the brook forget about summer and happily go on bubbling even through winter through the ice, never complaining “[a]bout the frozen time.”
The brook continues to flow without complaint, without disturbing it surroundings with melancholy. It continues its only occupation, and the human speaker interprets such persistence as happiness.
Third Stanza: “Ah! would ’t were so with many”In the third stanza, the speaker then turns to philosophizing about how it would be nice if people could go on so stalwartly in the face of loss. But he employs a rhetorical question to assert that people do not face loss with equanimity. Instead, they “writhe” “at passed joy.”
He then makes an odd claim: he says that no poetry has been written about what it is like “To know the change and feel it, / When there is none to heal it, / Nor numbed sense to steal it.” He, no doubt, is suggesting that no solution to the problem is commonly noted, that there is no earthly remedy for the loss of “passed joy.” But, of course, poetry is filled with melancholy ponderings of such sadness.
Another Keats article: Keats' "Ode to Autumn": A Celebration of Beauty
