"The Moon – To Each a Place" by James Frederick William Rowe

The Moon – To Each a Place

James Frederick William Rowe

By night you are a queen

"Keeper of the Night" Watercolor on Paper
By J. Artemus Gordon

In splendour amidst the spangled skies

Your subjects studded in worshipful array

Around the warm glow of the halo

Which encircles the pearlescent majesty

Of the face you show the world

Yet in the day you are alone

The shining glory of your vespertine visage

Now rendered pale and veiled by the misty blue

Of the sky which hides your courtiers

Against the king who brokers no rivals

Even from the supplicating stars

But perhaps your daylight diminution

The indignity of your muted manifestation

Is for a purpose so endured

That the Sun and we may be reminded

That the glare of his light may only obscure

Not unseat the many multitudes of heaven

Is this why you are wont to cover the Sun

To lay the coldness of your stone

Upon the heat of his fires?

Then in so eclipsing him in your kiss

And quenching his flames at the height of his hours

We can gaze at all his glory hides?

The Sun is one, the Stars are many

And you, Lady Luna, an inveterate pagan

Remind us of the divine plurality

No wonder Lucifer affords you

Hesperine hails, Eosphorine adieus

Rebellious even as he heralds the dawn

Yet you too are victim of a pride

Made false in the reflection of the light

That is not your own

And we are called to occult you in our shadow

Casting you back to the darkness

Which is yours but for the Sun

Your light is a borrowed glow, a stolen warmth

Yet be not ashamed that we know, dear Moon

For there is Day and there is Night

The One and the All

And only a fool worships but one

To the exclusion of the other

To the Moon: a place of honour

To the Sun: a place of glory

To the stars: a place of worship

To us: a place of understanding

So should it be, so shall it be

All as the spheres ordain

Poet’s Notes:  This piece is basically about the Moon's place in a sky that reflects a divine ordering of things. Whereas the Sun is a strict monotheist, blotting out all other rival claimants to his majesty, the Moon is the queen amidst her court of stars "an inveterate pagan". When she eclipses the Sun, she reminds him, whom she loves (and by whom she gains her light), that there are others in heaven—that the One must not be known to the exclusion of the All. Nevertheless, we too have to check her pride, when we eclipse her and show her for what she is: the reflection of the Sun's light. 

There tends to be in religious and philosophical systems a certain overemphasis on one side of the equation. Either people fixate on the unity of things or the plurality of things. I call these perspectives the "fallacy of the parts" and the "fallacy of the whole". Whereas the One is indeed One, it is also Many, and when the Many are Many, it is also One—to put undue emphasis on either the singularity of existence under God or the multitude of existent things is to deny a fundamental element of reality. To get even more technical and esoteric: I deny that the monotheistic and pantheistic conceptions of existence are superior to the panentheistic, which embraces both. 

I try to make this philosophical point in the poem as elegantly as I can by first triumphing the Moon's cause, and then denying her the honour she might try to usurp for herself. I also draw upon the well established use of stars—as found in Blake, Milton, and of course, the Book of Revelation—in the role of angels or (demi-)gods, and make reference to the Lucifer narrative in a literal sense of Venus as the morning/evening stars, as reflected in my: "No wonder Lucifer affords you / Hesperine hails, Eosphorine adieus / Rebellious even as he heralds the dawn". 

The poem concludes with the proper place for all things, "all as the spheres ordain"—or as laid out by the allegory of the heavens, as it were.  It is arranged in eight stanzas of six verses a piece. It was composed initially on the subway but substantially revised at home.