St Lucy (aka Lucia) was a virgin martyr in fourth-century Sicily. And according to one version of her story, she had beautiful eyes.
But when a persistent suitor made the mistake of admiring their loveliness once, she plucked them out and gave them to him, hoping he would leave the rest of her alone.
That probably didn’t happen in real life. Nor, perhaps, did she have her eyes gouged out by the Christian-persecuting Romans, a story that emerged only in later centuries.
She may well have been beheaded, however, as the Greek tradition of her story maintains.
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When the painter Caravaggio escaped from jail in Malta in 1608 and fled to Lucia’s native Syracuse, he won a commission to paint her burial for the church where her remains had rested (before being stolen).
X-rays of his picture show that he originally portrayed her as headless, which may not have suited local ambitions to promote the cult. Her head was restored in his finished version, with a sword wound on her throat to show how she died.
Eyes remain central to the saint’s iconography, meanwhile. She is often depicted carrying them on a plate, while Italians mark her feast day by eating them, or at least by eating small cakes or biscuits shaped like eyeballs in her honour.
The name Lucy shares its origins with the word lux, Latin for light. So it is no coincidence that the church deployed her feast day to coincide with the darkest time of the year.
Under the old Julian calendar, it fell on what was believed to be the winter solstice. And if December 13th is no longer considered the northern hemisphere’s shortest day, it retains a certain significance in this part of the world.
As well as falling on a Friday in 2024, with the usual ominous associations, December 13th will have Ireland’s earliest sunset (at 4.06pm in Dublin, later in the west).
Yes, the days will continue to shorten overall until the 21st. But while dawn will still be getting later until the end of December, the famous stretch in the evening starts this Saturday.
In the meantime, the year’s earliest nightfall lends renewed relevance to the title of John Donne’s otherwise dated poem: A Nocturnal Upon St Lucy’s Day, Being the Shortest Day.
Donne wallowed in the bleakness of what was still then (c.1620) considered the solstice. And he had his reasons.
Up late on the eve of December 13th, he was oppressed by the surrounding dark: “Tis the year’s midnight and it is the day’s/ Lucy’s, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks.”
But he was also remembering a woman he loved, now gone from him. This is usually thought to be his wife, who had died while giving birth in 1617, aged only 33, along with their 12th and last child.
On the other hand, Donne later lost a beloved daughter – called Lucy – in 1627, when she was only 17. And that same year, he was also mourning the woman she was named after – his friend and patron Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford, who may be the person mentioned in the verse.
Like the rest of his poems, however, the Nocturnal was published only after he died, so its dating is a matter of conjecture. At any rate, Donne sees himself in it as the personification of “absence, darkness, death”, compared with which even midwinter is light relief:
“The world’s whole sap is sunk;/ The general balm th’ hydroptic earth hath drunk,/ Whither, as to the bed’s-feet, life is shrunk,/ Dead and interred; yet all these seem to laugh, /Compared with me, who am their epitaph.”
Donne was in general a melancholic but seems to have had a particularly gloomy relationship with this date. On the last December 13th he lived to see, in 1630, he wrote his will, although it would be six months later before Donne, as it were, was done.
Maybe he suffered from what is now called seasonal affective disorder (SAD), in which case his mood might have benefited from the light ceremonies that have become traditional on this date, especially in benighted Scandinavia.
Those used to involve young women serving saffron cakes and gingerbread while wearing wreaths of lighted candles in their hair.
Then health and safety regulations caught up. Now, fake battery-powered candles are the norm. But the ceremonies remain popular in secular Sweden, with schools, villages, towns and cities electing their own Lucias, or choosing them at random.
Among other places marking the day this year will be the James Joyce Centre in Dublin. Lucia was the name chosen for Joyce’s daughter, even though she was born in July (on St Anne’s Day, hence her middle name Anna).
But her father was already suffering from eyesight problems then and may have felt the need for help from the patron saint of the blind and of ophthalmologists.
In any case, December 13th became a kind of second birthday for his daughter. This year it will include the launch at the centre at 1pm of Lucia Joyce: Full Capacity: an illustrated booklet by dance historian and documentary maker Deirdre Mulrooney.
