Jun 2020 – The moon in June

Our theme in June 2020 was Space – poems referring to space and heavenly bodies.

Our meeting was beset with problems of poor (at times no) sound and frozen images, but poems covering a good variety of ideas were enjoyed. These along with others left unread are mentioned below and can be found on the internet except for Ken’s and David’s own poems.

We started with ‘The Peace of Wild Things’ by Wendell Berry in which the poet finds solace in nature and senses the ‘day-blind stars’.

Next was Gerald Manley Hopkins ‘The Starlight Night’, a sonnet with two stanzas of characteristically amazing images of the heavens and a third dense with Christian theological concepts.

The first verse of Edward Fitzgerald’s ‘The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam’ contains, for me, two of the most striking images in all poetry, describing a sunrise.

The libretto by Montagu Slater for Benjamin Britten’s opera Peter Grimes contains the haunting aria ‘Now the Great Bear and Pleiades’ sung by the title character, revealing the rough fisherman’s awareness of his and indeed everyone’s insignificance.

Ken Gambles’ poem ‘March Moon‘ likened the crescent moon to the tusk of a mammoth with water drops in its woolly coat.

Robert Frost’s ‘But outer space’ is very short and aphoristic. His ‘On looking up by chance at the constellations’ is a nice conceit about the immutability of the heavenly bodies.

John McGrath’s ‘Song’ is a fine post-apocalyptic vision, though not explicitly mentioning our theme.

Emily Dickinson’s ‘The Moon and the Sea’, like the Hopkins, has two verses describing natural phenomena – in this case the tides – with a third linking it to the presumably Christian deity.

David Aldred’s song lyric ‘Bracelets‘ is another poem concerned with the moon over the sea.

Some other poems on the month’s topic are:

Joseph Addison ‘The Spacious Firmament on high’, in which the heavens attest to the truth of God.

Emily Dickinson ‘The Moon’ – atypically straightforward and dare I say a little soppy.

Walt Whitman ‘When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed’ is in memory of President Lincoln. In verses 1and 2, the lost statesman is likened to the Western Star (Venus) which falls out of sight around April, the time of the assassination.

Byron ‘Don Juan’, Canto 1, CXIII; trust Byron to make the moon complicit in the acts of lovers in the night.

Tennyson ‘Summer Night’; the middle lines of this beautiful lyric evoke the magic of the night sky.

Milton ‘Lycidas’; towards the end of this long poem addressed to a friend who drowned in the English Channel, the day-star sinks only to rise again – and likewise, Lycidas.

Blake ‘To the Evening Star’ – which the poet imagines protecting the people and flocks. Venus can be the evening, as well as the morning, star.

Shelley ‘The Moon’; a strange concept of the moon as a crazed old lady wandering the heavens.

Walt Whitman – many poems inspired by the heavenly bodies e.g. On the beach at night / On the beach at night alone / Passage to India (O vast Rondure, swimming in space) / Year of meteors.