Lunar Paraphrase

"Lunar Paraphrase" is a poem from the second (1931) edition of Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. One of Stevens's "war poems" from "Lettres d'un Soldat" (1918), it is in the public domain.[1]

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.


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,[2] 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.

Notes
  1. In a letter to his wife in 1918 he alludes to "Lunar Paraphrase" as one of his "war-poems". That remark is footnoted by Holly Stevens, the editor of Letters of Wallace Stevens, as follows:
    "Lettres d'un Soldat," Poetry, XII (May 1918), 59–65. According to the Wallace Stevens Checklist, by Samuel French Morse, Jackson R. Bryer, and Joseph N. Riddel (Denver: Alan Swallow; 1963), p. 54: "None of these poems was reprinted in the first edition of Harmonium." The 1931 edition of Harmonium contains the following poems from the group as separate entities: "The Surprises of the Superhuman" (C.P., 98); "Negation" (C.P., 97–98); "The Death of a Soldier," which was in Poetry as "Life contracts and death is expected" (C.P., 97); and "Lunar Paraphrase" (C.P., 107), which Miss Monroe did not include [in the Poetry printing]. Other poems from the group may be found in O.P., 10–16. (See also O.P., xix, for a comment by Samuel French Morse.)
  2. See the main Harmonium essay, the section "The Musical Imagist".
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References
  • Stevens, H. Letters of Wallace Stevens. 1966: Alfred A. Knopf
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