Poems: Descriptions of the Moon

Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, Canto I (trans. Mark Musa)
We seemed to be enveloped by a cloud
as brilliant, hard, and polished as a diamond
struck by a ray of sunlight.  That eternal,
celestial pearl took us into itself,
receiving us as water takes in light,
its indivisibility intact.

Galileo Galilei, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
(trans. Stillman Drake)
Just as the moon supplies us with the light we lack from the sun a great part of the time, and by reflection of its rays makes the nights fairly bright, so the earth repays it by reflecting the solar rays when the moon most needs them, giving a very strong illumination."

James Joyce, Simples
Of cool sweet dew and radiance mild
The moon a web of silence weaves
In the still garden where a child
Gathers the simple salad leaves.
A moon dew stars her hanging hair
And moonlight kisses her young brow
And, gathering, she sings an air:
Fair as the wave is, fair, art thou!
Be mine, I pray, a waxen ear
To shield me from her childish croon
And mine a shielded heart for her
Who gathers simples of the moon.

Pablo Neruda, Book of Questions (trans. William O'Daly)
Then it wasn't true
that God lived on the moon?

e. e. cummings, the Cambridge ladies
. . . . the Cambridge ladies do not care, above
Cambridge if sometimes in its box of
sky lavender and cornerless, the
moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy

D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love
"He stood staring at the water. Then he stooped and picked up a stone, which he threw sharply at the pond.  Ursula was aware of the bright moon leaping and swaying, all distorted, in her eyes.  It seemed to shoot out arms of fire like a cuttlefish, like a luminous polyp, palpitating strongly before her."

Rainer Maria Rilke, Girls Melancholy (trans. Edward Snow)
His smile was so soft and fine:
like gleaming on old ivory,
like homesickness, like a Christmas snowfall
in the dark village, like turquoise
around which many pearls are fashioned,
like moonlight
on a favorite book.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, To Jane
The keen stars were twinkling,
And the fair moon was rising among them,
Dear Jane.
The guitar was tinkling,
But the notes were not sweet till you sung them
Again.

As the moon's soft splendour
O'er the faint cold starlight of Heaven
Is thrown,
So your voice most tender
To the strings without soul had then given
Its own.

The stars will awaken,
Though the moon sleep a full hour later
To-night;
No leaf will be shaken
Whilst the dews of your melody scatter
Delight.

Though the sound overpowers,
Sing again, with your dear voice revealing
A tone
Of some world far from ours,
Where music and moonlight and feeling
Are one.

Jorge Luis Borges, Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (trans. Andrew Hurley)
"aerial-bright above dark-round"
"soft-amberish-celestial"
"Upward, behind the onstreaming it mooned."

Italo Calvino, The Distance of the Moon (from Cosmicomics)
(trans. William Weaver)
"[M]y thoughts were filled only with grief at having lost her, and my eyes gazed at the moon, forever beyond my reach, as I sought her.  And I saw her.  She was there where I had left her, lying on a beach directly over our heads, and she said nothing.  She was the color of the Moon; she held the harp at her side and moved one hand now and then in slow arpeggios.  I could distinguish the shape of her bosom, her arms, her thighs, just as I remember them now, just as now, when the moon has become that flat, remote circle, I still look for her as soon as the first sliver appears in the sky, and the more it waxes, the more clearly I imagine I can see her, her or something of her, but only her, in a hundred, a thousand different vistas, she who makes the Moon the Moon and, whenever she is full, sets the dogs to howling all night long, and me with them."