It's so easy in the cold to feel the darkness of the year

This longest night feels especially long. I found myself wondering whether, when she set the strange and ice-glittering Capricorn as guardian of the stair to the great waters that lie at the very depth of the sea in The Valley of Song (1951), Elizabeth Goudge had remembered that the sign of the goat-fish was once the symbol of Enki, the lord of the deep waters of life, or if she merely arrived at the likeness by way of solstice and water and the iconography of descent and return. I can imagine a drowned sun this year, roped down under the rush of the sea: salt-burst, strangling. Let it rise and leave its fetters to turn to seafoam, plaits of kelp tangled ashore in the dawn. It will not need a dark ship to return from Hades. Let it come in with the tide.