The Arctic Girl is out tonight

A poet living in rural Orkney longs for the light in the midwinter darkness

Last week I was sitting knitting. My Other was in the kitchen watching football, shouting with joy or agony, depending. Then – the lights went out. Power cuts aren’t unusual here and we are prepared.

But there’s a moment when it all goes dark when you think: are the candles in the kitchen? Where are the torches and the windy-up lamp with the horrid glow? I’m talking about profound, Orkney dark – not even a moon to light a bit of the sea.

My father, an art teacher, collected objects which would make good still lifes, and one of them is a brass candle holder with an excellent little square pad for your thumb to rest on. Oddly, I’d just recently buffed it up so it shone, and put a slim white candle in. In the dark, I felt my way to the mantelpiece for matches.

There was no draught, so the perfect tulip shape of the candle flame reached upwards, bathing everything in a gentle light. The brass twinkled. I thought: ­nothing to be done here, just enjoy the light and the silence. When everything switched on, and the TV burbled again, I felt an ache for that silent golden light. I wondered about the other 19,000 customers, who must also have felt a sudden darkness, a need for light.

When did you last sit in utter blackness with just a candle flame for company? I recommend it. It sends you to the great painters of light – like Joseph Wright of Derby – and to the old poets.

Donne’s sad “Nocturnal Upon St Lucy’s Day” – St Lucy’s being the shortest day – captures our intimate response to the ­winter solstice:

The sun is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;
The world’s whole sap is sunk …

I relate to this. In winter, the sun seems to scuttle along the horizon here like a crab on the shoreline – at the left of my window at 9 a.m.; by 3 p.m. it’s a mere glint behind the Scottish hills. I read somewhere that Finnish people just sit outside, faces to the sun, when it reappears in March.

No wonder my ancestors made big rings of stone. There’s been much excitement recently because the archaeologists working at the Ness of Brodgar, the enormous Neolithic site, have discovered “something new”, which they can’t quite tell us about.
I have a soft spot for the intrepid ­eighteenth-century proto-scientists Sir Joseph Banks and William Stukeley. Banks came to Orkney and sketched everything. Stukeley created great theories about Druidical practices. He even designed a costume he thought these chaps might wear, complete with laurel leaves. But, as always, the truth lies in local lore. No one touched the stone circles for centuries. People doffed their caps as they passed. The return of the light was never to be relied upon, so there were rituals. Offerings were placed on the top of burial mounds. The glorious confusion of Norse gods and Catholic tradition persisted, despite the rigours of Presbyterianism.

Orkney is a place where you can be in touch with deep time. The farmer found a Neolithic hand tool just outside my ­garden. My neighbour knows where an ancient stone cross lies, but hasn’t told ­anybody. It’s about the simplest of things – sowing, reaping, storing, hoping for another spring, leaving a mark.

The chambered cairn Maeshowe was built so that a wedge of light pierces it on the winter solstice, around three minutes past three. “The illumination lasts for a few minutes, then is quenched … it is a seal on the dying year, a pledge of renewal … the sun will not renege on its ancient treaty with men and the earth and all the creatures,” the Orcadian poet George Mackay Brown says. It was all the more poignant for him because of his tubercular lungs – he was afraid of the cold.

How clumsy and endearing he is,
the snowman,
A flocculent teddy-bear.
But I tell you friends,
He’s not what he seems to be …
He tore my chest open.

There are compensations, as Brown notes, like the Aurora.

The Arctic Girl is out tonight
Come to the door
She dances
in a coat of yellow and green patches.

Lamplight always brings comfort, as do snowflakes and stars. But we feel, with him, the hard grind until spring. Then, what celebration!

Ho Mistress Daffodil, said Ikey (tinker)
Where have you been all winter?
There was snow in the ditches last night
And here you are.
Did you light your lamp
In that blizzard?
Look now, sunrise
is tilting its jar of light over the world …
He tells the birds:
Between this snow
and the lucent solstice,
Compel the sunwheel,
Seek the balance
Of light and winter.
Rose and skull
In seeded islands.
Furl crosswings there.

Rose and skull – light and dark. Accept the contrasts, he’s saying. Just like the shortest day, the longest day will come. He prefaces a poem cycle about the Ring of Brodgar by saying: “A circle has no beginning or end. The symbol holds.”

Morag MacInnes is an Orcadian writer and lecturer.