Notes

1] St. Lucy's day, Dec. 13, was regarded as the shortest day in the old (Julian) calendar.

3] flasks: obsolete variant of flashes.

4] squibs: (unimpressive) fireworks.

6] general balm. It was thought that, as Donne puts it in one of his verse letters, "In everything there naturally grows / A Balsamum [balm] to keep it fresh and new."
hydroptic: dropsical.

7] Miss Gardner notes that in Hippocrates' famous description of the signs of imminent death the dying man huddles at the foot of the bed.

14] express: press out.

15] quintessence: the fifth essence of ancient and mediaeval philosophy and alchemy, latent inall things and the substance of the heavenly bodies.

17-18] ruin'd: probably used in an alchemical sense of reducing to elements. absence, darkness, death probably correspond to the three basic elements of alchemy: salt, sulphur, mercury.

21] limbec: alembic for distillation.

29] elixir: quintessence.

31] prefer: be able to select and reject. Donne is comparing the powers possessed by man, beasts, plants, and stones. Grierson quotes from a sermon in which Donne says that even stones, though they have not even a vegetable soul, "may have life'' and may therefore select and reject, i.e., "detest and love."

34] invest: clothe.

39] the Goat: Capricorn; at the winter solstice the sun enters Capricorn.

Other poems by John Donne