Gael Stuart

The Silver Sage

Are you ready? Come on along and read some homespun poetry as well as a jot and tittle regarding distinguished poets and their works. Gael offers a positive balance of her own nostalgia notes and poetic meanderings with those of others. [Editor's note: Gael no longer contributes to Silver Planet, but we have made her archived blog entries available as a service to our readers.]


Posted 01/16/2009

Moon Verse

By Gael Stuart

Do you take notice when the full moon appears to be extremely large? That is called the perigee moon, or point of closest approach to earth, and it makes the super-sized moon appear stunningly beautiful in the night sky—it really gets our attention.

To the delight of moon-watchers everywhere, just such a perigee full moon appeared in December 2008. It made me wonder if that was the celestial position of the moon when Edgar Allen Poe wrote his lengthy poem describing “A full-orbed moon, that like thine own soul soaring/Sought a precipitate pathway up through heaven.” Or whether Charles Best was inspired to write his sonnet about the “pale Queen of the silent night” while under the spell of such lunar beauty. Such a gigantic full moon certainly seems to affect humanity.

Was it a Christmastide full moon that inspired Clement Clarke Moore to pen “The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow gave the lustre of mid-day to objects below”? What do you think?

Of all the poems in the mooniverse (yes, it is a coined word), one of my favorites is shared here for your reading pleasure:

 To the Moon
(by Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792–1822)

Art thou pale for weariness
     Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
      Among the stars that have a different birth,
And ever changing, like a Joyless eye
     That finds no object worth its constancy?

Do you have a favorite moon poem?

By Gael Stuart
The Silver Sage Blog

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