moonset and moonrise (literary)

It was the absence of a moon in the evening that made Jupiter shine so brilliantly last week. (On Sept 21st Jupiter was at its brightest for 47 years.) But anyway, here are some moon observations from the Brief History.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850), from "Strange Fits of Passion" (1799):

Upon the moon I fixed my eye,
All over the wide lea;
With quickening pace my horse drew nigh
Those paths so dear to me.

And now we reached the orchard plot;
And, as we climbed the hill,
The sinking moon to Lucy’s cot
Came near, and nearer still.

Wordsworth wrote the Lucy poems while in Germany.

The moon sets every day, but we don’t often see it do so. Canonical literature, so loquacious about sunsets, virtually ignores the existence of moonsets, except in this poem.

We most usually notice the moon when it’s full, and we draw each other's attention to the big (or apparently big) moonrise that occurs soon after sunset. A moonset near the full, however, would occur around dawn, the coldest part of the night; when (at least in temperate climes) we tend to sleep on, and even if we happen to be out and about the spectacle of moonset is probably lost in the mist (if not in broad daylight). The most impressive moonset I've seen was a lazy moon on a cold winter night which became yellower and bigger, and finally just after midnight a smoky red as it dropped into the west. So rarely have I noticed a moonset in my fifty years that it hadn't really occurred to me that the setting moon must often go through the same colour changes as the setting sun.

If the moon is going to set earlier in the evening, not too many hours after sunset, it must be a brand-new sliver of a moon, which is probably not what most readers envisage while they're reading Wordsworth's poem. Yet evening, we imagine, is when the action takes place.

However, the hill makes a difference. After crossing the “wide lea”, with the moon spreading its light, the lover starts to ascend rather sharply, and “Lucy’s cot” is on a ridge. Thus the moon could seem to “set” when still comparatively high in the sky. Wordsworth had often noticed the sharpness of Lakeland’s high night-horizons, and e.g. famously written of how “the stars moved along the edges of the hills”.

My horse moved on; hoof after hoof
He raised, and never stopped:
When down behind the cottage roof,
At once, the bright moon dropped.

To realize the emotional charge of this, it’s worth going out on a suitable clear evening and making it happen. The roof should be quite close, perhaps less than a hundred meters away; it happens just as the lover arrives. The moon falls “at once” because it is the lover’s own relatively rapid approach, not the moon’s descent, that causes it to drop out of sight. In those nights without any streetlights, the instantaneous change in the light would have been dramatic. If you are suitably sensitized, it still can cause a shiver.

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A graveyard in moonlight, engraving by Thomas Bewick for his History of British Birds, Vol II (Water Birds), 1804).

[Image source: British Museum .]

In the opening pages of Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë says (of the above Bewick engraving): "I cannot tell what sentiment haunted the quite solitary churchyard with its inscribed headstone; its gate, its two trees, its low horizon, girdled by a broken wall, and its newly risen crescent, attesting the hour of even-tide." In fact a crescent moon rises either early in the day (if waxing) or late in the night (if waning). The sharp crescent moon we see in the evening is not newly risen, it just seems that way because we only notice it when it gets dark; actually, it's getting ready to set. As for Charlotte's assertion that the crescent-shape implies even-tide, she's right in this case, because it's a waxing moon (horns pointing to the left); but a waning crescent would mean it's near dawn. 

And at the beginning of Chapter 5, the young Jane Eyre is leaving Mrs Reed's house for Lowood. "Five o'clock had hardly struck on the morning of the 19th of January, when Bessie brought a candle into my closet and found me already up and nearly dressed. I had risen half an hour before her entrance, and had washed my face, and put on my clothes by the light of a half-moon just setting, whose ray streamed through the narrow window near my crib." Well, wrong again! A waxing half-moon would have set at midnight; a waning half moon would still be on the rise. But a moon that sets some time between 5 and 6 in the morning (as we are later informed) would have to be almost a full moon - say, 90%. Here, and later (e.g. Chapter 9), Charlotte Brontë registers what a significant aid moonlight was for getting things done in the hours of darkness. There was more reason in those days for noticing the moon; evidently this didn't necessarily mean observing it. It's tempting to make more of these small inaccuracies than they probably merit: to be struck by the mixture, in Charlotte Brontë, of very close observation - we have just read the wonderful description of pine-tree debris clotted together by frost - combined with a certain proud inattentiveness to fact. It's no wonder to be ignorant of the moon's movements, but it does seem remarkable for someone to be so aware of the moon as a mobile creature and yet not to know its patterns. And I can't resist connecting this with how long the author had been satisfied with her Angrian settings of a Yorkshire landscape in Africa, in total defiance of what we suppose she must have known of African climates. Naturalism was a cloak she learnt to put on, but her imagination was always busy with other things than naturalism.

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Charlotte wasn't alone in that. But it isn't the right explanation for an even more affronting sentence, from a famous scene in Scott's The Heart of Midlothian:

As our heroine approached this ominous and unhallowed spot, she paused and looked to the moon, now rising broad in the north-west, and shedding a more distinct light than it had afforded during her walk thither. Eyeing the planet for a moment, she then slowly and fearfully turned her head towards the cairn, from which it was at first averted.

(Ch 14)

In this case, "north-west" is evidently just a slip of the pen: Scott meant to write "north-east", which is about where the full moon does rise. This is confirmed by what he adds straight afterwards: the moonlight had been obscured during Jeanie's walk from St Leonard’s (because of the ridge to the north of Arthur's Seat), but now that she's arrived at Muschat's Cairn, which is at the extreme north of Holyrood Park, her view to the north-east is uninterrupted. 

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Finally, a poem that's very definitely observation. It may be titled "Moonset", but I'm not sure because the anthology where I found it sometimes makes up its own titles. 

Idles the night wind through the dreaming firs,

   That waking murmur low,

As some lost melody returning stirs

   The love of long ago;

And through the far, cool distance, zephyr fanned,

The moon is sinking into shadow-land.

The first stanza of three. It's by E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake) (1861 - 1914). A Canadian poet, popular in her lifetime, she was born on the Six Nations Indian Reserve in Canada West (Ontario), the daughter of an Englishwoman and a Mohawk chief.