December Elegy, by Morten Veland for Tristania

May, thou carry me to the sea
Like Autumn leaves, heaven withers
Savage is the winter prevailing within
I fall for thee
Sorrow entreating me
Makes me leave heaven

I find thy lilies there in snow
where once I died, weeping for thee
Everlasting seems the strife ascending within
Falling for thee
Darkness confounding me
Makes me leave life

Breed my woe
Descend with broken wings
Midwinternight inside
Merged by life
Like thousand frozen tears
Come melt the ice, maytime

An “elegy” is a type of poetic metre, which was used in Ancient Greece. However, it is nowadays used as a general denomination for poems which describe sorrow and mourning. December Elegy was written in 1998 by Morten Veland for the musical group Tristania, and thus its name derives from the modern meaning of “elegy”. The poem describes the narrator’s wishes for summer during wintertimes.

December Elegy is divided into three stanzas, consisting of six lines each. There is a seemingly random rhyming scheme. The first stanza rhymes ABCAAD, and the second EACAAF. Note that several of these rhyming pairs are repetitions, such as “within” and “within”. The only true rhymes found in those stanzas are “sea”, “thee” and “me”, and only the former is used just a single time. The third and last stanza seems to abandon rhymes altogether; disregarding “life” rhyming on itself from the prior stanza, there is only “woe”, which rhymes on the first line of the second stanza, “snow”.

The lack of a rhyming scheme suggests that the rhymes, which do exist, are a coincident. Since they are so far apart, they do not have any appreciable effect on the reader. However, the repetitions are effective. The two lines ending in “thee” are merely rewordings of each other, and such emphasize the fact that the narrator is falling for “you”. The third lines in both stanzas constitute the “within”-rhyme. These two lines both describe what is happening inside the narrator; about the dominating winter and the interior strife. This theme also carries on to the third stanza, although it uses a synonym of “within” instead: “Midwinternight inside”.

Partly due to the lack of rhymes, the rhythm cannot be easily discerned. It can be seen that the first two stanzas are very alike in the number of syllables per line, differing only slightly in the third and last lines, although this does not simplify reading out aloud. There is thus no apparent rhythm.

Winter, darkness and sorrow are themes which appear throughout the poem, and this influences the tone. Veland has chosen lyrics with connotations of negative feelings, such as coldness. Some of these words are “winter”, “frozen”, “savage” and “wither”. In some way, nearly all of the words are connected to winter. This creates an unfriendly atmosphere.

Veland also uses intricate and rare words. An obvious example is the archaic pronouns “thou” and “thee”. “Entreating” and “confounding” are two other words which are not common today. These archaisms produce the feeling that this happened a long time ago. They also contribute to the feeling of distance and coldness, since it is distant in time.

As noted above, December Elegy is divided into three stanzas. These constitute three different parts, or modes, of the poem. The first stanza begins with an invocation to May, defining that month as “thou” in the poem. In the rest of the stanza, the narrator explains how wonderful May is, e.g. “I fall for thee”, and how the winter arrives, for example “Like Autumn leaves, heaven withers”, which describes the whitening of the sky.

In the second stanza, the narrator becomes more desperate after May. He sees lilies, which are known for forming leafless bulbs for protection against winter, lying in the snow. As May is absent, he finds it difficult to stay alive: “Everlasting seems the strife”. Darkness engulfs him, and he completely loses his will to live: “Makes me leave life”.

The last stanza sees a cry for help, directed at May. Veland begs May to come down to him: “descend with broken wings”. Again, he emphasizes the coldness, now with midwinter, which is the middle of the winter, and thus the strongest and most harsh. The poem finishes with a final request that May melts the winter.

December Elegy could be interpreted as a simple tribute to summer and the happiness which it brings. However, there are several arguments against this. First, the title of the poem reveals that it is an elegy, which, as noted in the introduction, is used to describe feelings of sorrow and mourning. Also, the feelings expressed within the poem are very deep, which the writer achieves mainly through his use of words with epic connotations. As an example, the “everlasting strife” of which Veland writes is an inappropriate hyperbole for three months of winter.

I believe that the December Elegy tells not of the loss of summer in a strict literary sense, but of the loss of the metaphorical summer of the narrator, most probably a beloved person. This theory is further reinforced by the fact that May is also both female name and a surname. Instead of the joys of summer, the joys, which this person constitutes for the narrator, are told of.

The second stanza mentions lilies in the snow. Snow is an antonym of summer, which indicates the absence of May, and thus the absence of the narrator’s beloved. Lilies are commonly used on funerals. This gives another clue that the first person has lost someone. The final line could be interpreted as the person dreaming –or trying to dream—of the days when his beloved was there, the “maytime”.

There might be a message in the poem that one should not cling too hard to lost things. However, I believe that it is merely a depiction an event. Another interpretation would be that the poem really does describe the change of seasons, and that the message is that you always get a new chance. There is always a new summer after every winter.

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