Lunar Paraphrase / Wallace Stevens

"Lunar Paraphrase" is a poem from by American poet Wallace Stevens.

Lunar Paraphrase

 * The moon is the mother of pathos and pity.


 * When, at the wearier end of November,
 * Her old light moves along the branches,
 * Feebly, slowly, depending upon them;
 * When the body of Jesus hangs in a pallor,
 * Humanly near, and the figure of Mary,
 * Touched on by hoar-frost, shrinks in a shelter
 * Made by the leaves, that have rotted and fallen;
 * When over the houses, a golden illusion
 * Brings back an earlier season of quiet
 * And quieting dreams in the sleepers in darkness—


 * The moon is the mother of pathos and pity.

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History
"Lunar Paraphrase" was written in 1917, as part of Stevens's "war poems," ""Lettres d'un Soldat". It did not appear in the version of "Lettres d'un Soldat" published in Poetry magazine that year, or in his 1923 debut collection, Harmonium; the poem's earliest appearance is in the 2nd edition of Harmonium, published in 1931.

Analysis
The poem makes use of a late autumn night to express a mood. It appropriates Christian images in a manner that is consistent with a naturalism that disclaims religious belief. (See Sunday Morning for another expression of that outlook.) Stevens's post-Christian sensibility channels emotions into nature rather than God and associated religious figures like Jesus and Mary. In this case, pathos and pity are channeled into autumn and the moon. Vendler has proposed that the weather is the only phenomenon to which Stevens was passionately attached, and a poem like "Lunar Paraphrase" shows how that might be true, when the weather is understood as representing nature as a focus for emotions that otherwise might have been given religious expression. Stevens's poetic naturalism was a significant achievement, from which he may or may not have retreated at the end of his life, depending on what one makes of the evidence of a deathbed conversion to Catholicism.

The movement of the moon's old light may be compared to the light in Tattoo, which crawls over the water like a spider.