The Moon and Sea
Whilst the moon decks herself in Neptune's glass
And ponders over her image in the sea,
Her cloudy locks smoothing from off her face
That she may all as bright as beauty be;
It is my wont to sit upon the shore
And mark with what an even grace she glides
Her two concurrent paths of azure o'er,
One in the heavens, the other in the tides:
Now with a transient veil her face she hides
And ocean blackens with a human frown;
Now her fine screen of vapour she divides
And looks with all her light of beauty down;
Her splendid smile over-silvering the main
Spreads her the glass she looks into again.
As the moon rises, so its image deepens in the ocean waves as they slap and push their way toward the shore. It's a sight both ordinary and eternal. Our ancestors saw it when the Sphinx was without flaw, and future generations—whenever they emerge from their hygienic domes of endless light—will shiver with its mystery.
In Darley's poem, the moon "decks" or adorns herself while staring at the sea, or "Neptune's glass," like a woman admiring herself in a mirror. The comparison is lush and sensual, and creates a slow, sultry mood. His reference to the Roman god evokes a landscape where ancient myths mingle with the dull facts of mere matter. The symbolism of Neptune may appear quaint, yet it persists to this very day through the psychological shorthand of sun-sign astrology, where it rules Pisces, the realm of the imagination. It grants vision, yet threatens madness. It represents loss of ego—an experience of spiritual transcendence or self-destruction. For the poet, the banal sight of the clouds momentarily parting to reveal the moon suggests a woman smoothing "her cloudy locks" from off her face, so she can appreciate her beauty in its full light. Her narcissism recalls the story of the preening youth Narcissus who wasted away because he could not tear himself from his own reflection. Yet her unblinking eye also recalls God himself, brooding over the primordial waters in the Book of Genesis.
The scene is still, serene and ecstatically beautiful. Nature communes with itself, regardless of us. Yet there the poet sits, transfixed, upon the shore. He opens his mind up to the uncanny and finds "an even grace." It is the lone, questing mind that makes sense of heaven and earth.
He notes the "concurrent paths" of the moon and its flickering image. It is difficult not to feel some kind of symbolic significance at work here, yet the meaning is cryptic. One way of reading it, perhaps, is to say that while the eternal and the temporal are one, they appear from our perspective to be split. We exist in the realm of duality, while longing for wholeness.
The lunar realm has long been associated with mutability, magic and midsummer madness. As Juliet exclaims to her lover Romeo in Shakespeare's tragedy Romeo and Juliet: "O swear not by the moon, th'inconstant moon/ That monthly changes in her circled orb/ Lest that thy love prove likewise variable." In the Darley's poem the moon is nothing if not a tease. One moment she hides behind a "transient veil," provoking a "human frown" in the ocean pining for her attention, the next moment she steps out from behind her "screen" and blazes her full light down.
The poem concludes with what may appear a sentimental touch: the moon's "splendid smile" that illuminates the very mirror in which she admires herself. Yet listen to hissing row of "s" sounds in "splendid smile over-silvering" that summon up the hush and crush of the "main" or sea. There is something ghastly and morbid here. Somehow at the very moment the moon seems at her most magnificent she seems to have lost her mind. Is she more hag than maiden? I am reminded of that most famous, mysterious and forbidding of women, the Mona Lisa, the secret of whose smile has never been cracked.
The poem begins and ends with the "glass." Like the moon, and by extension nature itself, it traces a circle, going nowhere. So what do we conclude? On the one hand, the poem exalts the moon's beauty; on the other, it shows her mono-mania, her ever-smiling vapidity and even delirium. It is the poet's role perhaps to mediate between this mindless sublimity and the barren intellectualism of the city.
George Darley (1795-1846) was an Irish poet, novelist, mathematician and critic.
Christopher Nield is a poet living in London.
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