December: A Poetry Lover’s Guide to the Last Month

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December is where the year comes to rest

Not a full stop. More like a long exhale.

The year has been happening to you since January, all that growth, all those turning points, all those seasons accumulating one on top of another. And now here you are. The last month. The shortest days. The longest nights. The strange, compressed, emotionally charged weeks between the winter solstice and the new year, when time seems to slow down and everything you’ve been carrying all year asks to be looked at before you carry it forward.

December is quiet in a different way from November. November’s quiet is bare, stripped back, and honest. December’s quiet is full. Candlelit. Brimming with memory and anticipation and the particular weight of everything that has happened since this time last year.

And that fullness, that density of feeling, that accumulation of the whole year pressing against the end of itself is one of the richest conditions for poetry there is.

This is the last post in this series. We’ve come all the way around. And December, I think, is the month to bring everything together to write with everything you’ve learned and felt and noticed over the whole year.

Let’s end well.

What December Carries

December is perhaps the most culturally layered month of all twelve. There is so much happening across so many traditions that it would take its own series to do justice to it all.

The winter solstice falls around December 21st in the northern hemisphere, the shortest day, the longest night, and then the slow turning back toward light. This is one of the oldest marked moments in human history. Stonehenge was built to align with it. Yule, the Norse and Germanic midwinter celebration, coincides with it. The solstice has been at the centre of human spiritual and creative life for thousands of years.

Christmas, of course, falls on December 25th and dominates the cultural landscape of the English-speaking world and many others. But it’s worth remembering that December holds many other significant celebrations. Hanukkah, the Jewish festival of lights, moves through the calendar but often falls in December. Kwanzaa, celebrating African American heritage and culture, runs from December 26th to January 1st. Bodhi Day, marking the Buddha’s enlightenment, falls on December 8th in some traditions. And in many countries, New Year’s Eve on December 31st is the emotional culmination of the whole month.

What all of these traditions share, across their enormous differences, is light. Candles, stars, fire, lanterns. December is the month when humans everywhere respond to the darkness by making light. That impulse is deeply, fundamentally poetic.

Poems Worth Reading in December

December has a rich reading list full of light, memory, longing, and the particular tenderness of endings.

Thomas Hardy’s The Darkling Thrush is one of the great December poems. Written on the last day of the nineteenth century, it describes a landscape stripped bare and apparently dead and then a thrush singing from somewhere in the gloom with a joy that Hardy cannot account for and cannot quite believe. It’s a poem about hope arriving unexpectedly, in the darkest moment, from an unlikely source. Read it at the Poetry Foundation.

In Hanukkah and the Jewish poetic tradition, Emma Lazarus is the nineteenth-century American Jewish poet whose sonnet “The New Colossus” is inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty. But her wider work, including poems about Jewish identity, history, and the life of the mind, is far less known than it should be. Her Poetry Foundation page is a good starting point.

For the solstice and the return of light, look at the opening of Dante’s Divine Comedy, which begins on the night before Good Friday, but whose movement from darkness through purgatory to light is the great poem of spiritual return. Even the opening tercets, with their downward movement into darkness before the journey toward light begins, feel deeply appropriate to December.

For something warm and intimate and completely contemporary, look at Ross Gay an American poet whose collection Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude is one of the most joyful and moving books of recent years. His long title poem is a kind of ecstatic thanksgiving for the physical world, for community, for the bodies we inhabit. It’s a perfect December poem, full, generous, and honest about both delight and grief. More at the Academy of American Poets.

And for the specific longing of the season, Christina Rossetti’s In the Bleak Midwinter best known as a carol, is actually a quietly extraordinary poem in its own right. That image of earth as hard as iron, water like a stone, the whole world sealed and frozen and then the small domestic warmth of the manger is a perfect December compression of cold and light. Read it at the Poetry Foundation.

On Writing Endings

Since this is both December and the last post in this series, I want to think about endings properly.

We touched on how poems end back in August, the Heaney “click,” the final line that locks everything into place. But December asks a bigger question: how do you end a whole year of writing? How do you bring something to a close that has meant something?

The answer, I think, is the same as it is for a single poem. You don’t try to summarise or to conclude. You find an image, a moment, a single true thing, and you let that carry the weight of everything that came before it.

The best endings feel both inevitable and surprising. Like the last line was always going to be the last line, and yet you didn’t see it coming. That’s what you’re looking for in December in your poems and in the year. Not a conclusion. A resonance. Something that keeps sounding after the words stop.

T.S. Eliot ended The Waste Land with the word “Shantih”, a Sanskrit word for the peace that passes understanding, repeated three times. After hundreds of lines of fragmentation and despair, that Sanskrit word lands like a door quietly closing. That’s the kind of ending December asks for.

Find your word. Find your image. Let it close the year gently.

Tips for Writing in December

Here’s what I’ve found useful in the last month, still learning right to the end.

Write in candlelight or low light. December evenings, lit by candlelight, fairy lights, or the glow of a fire, have a quality that electric light doesn’t. If you can write even once this month in that kind of warm, low, flickering light, it does something to what you produce. The words come differently.

Write the year’s inventory. December is the natural month for looking back. What has the year been? Not in a journalistic way, in an imagistic way. What images stand out from the last twelve months? What do you keep returning to? Write a poem that is a kind of year-end ledger, not of events, but of images, feelings, moments of sudden noticing.

Write toward the light. December is dark, but it is also genuinely, astronomically, the beginning of the return of light. After the solstice, the days lengthen. Write a poem that holds both the darkness and the knowledge that the light is turning. Let it be honest about the dark and hopeful about the light. Both at the same time.

Give yourself a gift. Write a poem just for you. Not for sharing, not for workshop, not for feedback. A poem you write entirely for yourself, about something only you would understand. A private poem. Keep it.

Write a letter to next year. This is not quite a poem, but it’s a poetic exercise. Write a letter to yourself in January of next year. Tell them what you’ve learned. What do you want to carry forward? What you want to leave behind and what you hope for. Then seal it and read it next December.

December Writing Prompts

Five prompts for the last month of the year.

Prompt one: Write a poem of return. Something coming back light, a person, a feeling you thought was gone, a version of yourself you’d lost. Let the return be complicated. Nothing comes back exactly as it was.

Prompt two: Write a year’s worth of the world in twelve lines, one image per month. Not the big events. The small noticing. The thing that catches now, looking back, as the truest thing about each month.

Prompt three: Write a poem about a specific December tradition, yours, your family’s, your culture’s. Not what it means officially, but what it actually means to you, in the specific way you experience it. Let the poem be particular rather than universal.

Prompt four: Write a poem about darkness that is not about fear. What does darkness give you that light doesn’t? What happens to you, or around you, when it is properly, deeply dark? Find something true there.

Prompt five: Write a poem that ends with the word “begin.” Let the whole poem move toward that word. Let December, the ending month, arrive at a beginning.

Forms to Try in December

December suits forms that are circular, resonant, and willing to return.

The villanelle came up in April, and it belongs here, too, perhaps even more. The villanelle’s two refrains keep returning, gaining weight and meaning each time, until they arrive together at the end and something locks into place. Dylan Thomas’s Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night is the model. Try writing a villanelle about something you want to hold onto, or something you’re ready to let go of. The form will do something with time and repetition that no other form quite manages.

The crown of sonnets is an ambitious December project, seven sonnets in which the last line of each becomes the first line of the next, and the last line of the seventh returns to the first line of the first. It’s a complete circle. A year made of poems. If you’ve been writing all year, a crown of sonnets in December is a beautiful way to bring everything together. You don’t have to write all seven at once. Write one a week through December.

And the lyric essay a hybrid form that combines the personal, associative quality of the essay with the compression and image-richness of poetry is perfect for December reflection. It doesn’t follow an argument so much as follow an image or feeling wherever it leads. Maggie Nelson’s Bluets is a lyric essay. So are many of Anne Carson’s pieces. Try writing one this month about the year that’s ending. Let it ramble and circle and arrive somewhere you didn’t expect.

Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, and the Poetry of Light

Since December holds so many celebrations centred on light, it’s worth thinking about what light means as a poetic subject across different traditions.

The menorah’s eight lights, kindled one by one through Hanukkah, each tell a story of persistence and miracle. The kinara’s seven candles of Kwanzaa represent unity, self-determination, collective work, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity, and faith, each one a poetic principle. The Diwali lamps we may have seen in October or November light the way for Lakshmi, the goddess of fortune. The Christmas star guides travellers toward something new.

Across all of these traditions, light is not just comfort against darkness. It is meaning made visible. It is the human insistence that the dark does not have the last word. And that insistence, warm, stubborn, beautiful, is one of the oldest and most fundamental impulses that poetry also embodies.

When you write in December, you are participating in that tradition. You are making a small light. You are insisting, with words instead of candles, that the dark does not have the last word.

That’s worth remembering when the poem feels too small, too personal, or not good enough. It doesn’t have to be The Waste Land. It just has to be lit.

Where to Read and Share in December

The Academy of American Poets has resources for Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, and the winter solstice throughout December.

The Poetry Foundation has a searchable collection. Try searching “winter,” “light,” “solstice,” “snow,” or “return” and see what the archive gives you.

For UK readers, the Poetry Society often has December events, and the winter issue of The Poetry Review is worth seeking out.

If you’ve been following along all year and writing, December is the month to seriously consider submitting your work. The Submission Grinder lists open calls. Many literary magazines run winter submission windows. The Rattle Poetry Prize accepts submissions year-round.

And r/OCPoetry, which has been there every month of this series, is there for your December poems too. Share something. The end of the year is a good time.

A Note on the Whole Year

We’ve made it. Twelve months. Twelve posts. A full turn of the year.

Looking back across everything we’ve covered the January quiet, February’s complicated love, March’s mud and turning, April’s abundance, May’s complicated beauty, June’s long light, July’s heat, August’s bittersweet golden afternoons, September’s clarity, October’s haunting, November’s honest dark December feels like the right place to rest and look back.

You don’t have to have written a poem every month to have gained something from reading alongside this series. Sometimes reading is enough. Sometimes thinking about writing, even without putting words down, plants something that grows later without you noticing. Poetry works like that. It goes underground and emerges somewhere unexpected, in its own time.

But if you have been writing even occasionally, even badly, even just fragments and false starts and half-finished things, you have done something real. You have been paying attention, and you have been putting language around your experience. You have been, in some small way, making light in the dark.

That matters. It genuinely does.

On Beginning Again

The last thing I want to say, because December is also always already about January, about the turn, about what comes next, is this.

The best thing poetry teaches you is that beginnings are always available. A blank page is always available. No matter how long the gap, no matter how out of practice you feel, no matter how much you doubt whether what you have to say is worth saying, the page is there. Waiting without impatience. Ready for whatever you bring to it.

January is coming. The light is already, right now, after the solstice, beginning its slow return. The year will come around again. The prompts will still work. The poems will still be there to read. The forms will still be waiting to be tried.

And you, wherever you are in your writing, whatever you managed or didn’t manage this year, you are still someone who reads poetry, who thinks about it, who maybe sometimes picks up a pen and tries. That is not nothing. That is, in fact, quite a lot.

Thomas Hardy’s thrush sang in the bleak midwinter for no accountable reason. The poem doesn’t explain it and doesn’t try to. It just witnesses it as a small, unlikely joy in the darkest moment, singing because that’s what it does.

Go and do likewise.

Happy writing. Happy December and Happy New Year. See you in January.