Verses and Sonnets

Chapter 21: THE MOON’S FUNERAL.

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About This Book

This collection assembles sonnets, short lyrics, grotesques and epigrams that shift between playful satire and serious meditation. Poems evoke nocturnal reverie, pastoral songs, seasonal sonnets for each month, and compact narrative sketches, while recurring themes include youth and ageing, love and honour, music and faith, mortality and urban poverty. Formal variety—from polished sonnet sequences to biting epigrams—allows intimate love poems to sit beside comic portraits and moral reflections, producing a compact, varied lyrical volume that alternates tenderness, irony, and moral urgency across domestic, religious, and public scenes.

THE MOON’S FUNERAL.

The Moon is dead. I saw her die.

She in a drifting cloud was drest,

She lay along the uncertain west,

A dream to see.

And very low she spake to me:

“I go where none may understand,

I fade into the nameless land,

And there must lie perpetually.”

And therefore I,

And therefore loudly, loudly I

And high

And very piteously make cry:

“The Moon is dead. I saw her die.”

And will she never rise again?

The Holy Moon? Oh, never more!

Perhaps along the inhuman shore

Where pale ghosts are

Beyond the far lethean fen

She and some wide infernal star—

To us who loved her never more,

The Moon will never rise again.

Oh! never more in nightly sky

Her eye so high shall peep and pry

To see the great world rolling by.

For why?

The Moon is dead. I saw her die.