'The Shortest Day', a poem and children's book celebrates the winter solstice

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SUSAN COOPER: (Reading) So the shortest day came, and the year died. And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world came people singing, dancing to drive the dark away.

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

Thursday, December 21 is the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere.

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COOPER: (Reading) They lighted candles in the winter trees. They hung their homes with evergreen. They burned beseeching fires all night long to keep the year alive.

SIMON: For more than 40 years, people have been reading and performing Susan Cooper's poem "The Shortest Day" to celebrate the winter solstice.

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COOPER: (Reading) And when the new year's sunshine blazed awake they shouted, reveling. Down all the frosty ages you can hear them echoing behind us. Listen.

SIMON: In 2019, we spoke to Susan Cooper about the children's book she created from the poem.

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COOPER: It's a family celebration of the light coming back after the dark threatens to take over the world.

SIMON: We've been asking authors and illustrators how they work together or work separately to translate words into pictures. For "The Shortest Day," Susan Cooper collaborated with Carson Ellis, the illustrator, by mail.

COOPER: I said in a letter to Carson that there is no story in this poem. We have to put the story in the pictures. So it's up to you, kid.

CARSON ELLIS: (Laughter).

COOPER: And she certainly did.

ELLIS: It was one long, beautiful, very forthright, kind of daunting letter that Susan wrote to me kind of telling me what she wanted the book to be able to do, and it completely changed the direction I was going in. And it was really daunting. I read the letter and thought, oh, gosh, this is a much harder book.

COOPER: (Laughter) Oh, dear.

ELLIS: My initial response was that I wanted it to look sort of like a Bruegel painting. If you know who Bruegel is, he's, like, a 16th-century painter. He painted this really famous painting called Hunters in the Snow, I think. A lot of people would recognize it. And he painted a lot of medieval scenes and a lot of great winter scenes. So I had this idea that I could kind of set the poem against the backdrop of medieval life and sort of chock it full of medieval detail so there would be a lot to glean about a life in medieval northern Europe from the book. That was kind of my initial response to it. But I started to mock this book up in this way that had these kind of merry villagers reveling on their way to a solstice celebration.

And I sent it to Susan to ask her some questions. I had questions about the chronology of the poem, and I had questions about the history of the solstice. So we had this exchange. And when she saw these kind of cheerful, lighthearted illustrations, she kind of corrected me and said, that's not really what this book is about. It's a book about deeper and more serious stuff, to paraphrase her. It just - basically, the sense that long ago, those shortening days - along with them came a lot of dread associated with the cold and starvation. And actually, I feel like Susan should be talking about what this book is about.

COOPER: (Laughter).

ELLIS: So I'm going to stop here.

COOPER: The pictures show you not just the shortest day. They show you the way the light gradually gets less and less as the year diminishes towards the end. Carson does this beautifully by having three or four pictures before the poem even starts showing you the sun weakening as the year goes on and the dread that this used to bring in the minds of primitive peoples until the sun comes up again after the shortest day, which is the beginning of hope. And the pictures managed to take you through time so that you are seeing those peasants from the Bruegel painting, but you are also seeing the same feelings echoed right up to the present day.

ELLIS: And I would add also that that idea of starting with those wordless spreads was actually Susan's idea. When we were initially talking about how to do the book, I think she said something like, you know, it's a pretty short poem, and we have 32 pages. Do we have to initially jump right into the text? And it was such an obvious and brilliant way to start the book. I was sort of embarrassed that I hadn't thought of it (laughter) myself as the illustrator.

COOPER: It's a great idea. I didn't think of it myself, either. I stole it from my daughter (laughter).

ELLIS: Oh.

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COOPER: So we're both indebted.

ELLIS: Another thing I love about this book is that as a kid, I grew up in a really secular Jewish household. We celebrated Christmas and Hanukkah, but the general joy of the holidays associated with the birth of Christ was sort of lost on me. So this book helped me understand a little bit the joy of those winter holidays. It's more universal, and it really is just kind of light triumphing over darkness. And light is always a cause to celebrate.

COOPER: And I have an echo from my childhood, I think, because I was a kid during World War II in England. And the long, dark nights were the nights that brought the Nazi bombers over, when we would be sitting in our air raid shelter underneath the back lawn with mum reading books to us by the light of a candle. And when the bombs came closer, the candle would shake. And it's the obviously subconscious echo that, I think, has gone all through my writing life. And in this poem, particularly in this book, the line at the end of the book, people carol, feast, give thanks and dearly love their friends and hope for peace. Don't we all?

SIMON: Susan Cooper and Carson Ellis, the Newbery and Caldecott Award-winning author and illustrator, talking about their book "The Shortest Day." Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.