The silver apples of the moon / The golden apples of the sun.
W.B. Yeats
The moon has always been the province of poets and songwriters. And now it is a destination. No, not for low-housing, but as a base for further space travel. One hopes not for colonizing other planets.
Of course, we knew early on it was our satellite but wolves
howled at it and troubadours pined under it to the point of lunacy.
For Somerset Maugham in The Moon and Sixpence, it represented the sublime. For Shakespeare, inconstancy. Eugene O'Neill saw the moon as a symbol of redemption in his A Moon for the Misbegotten.
In Peggy's poem, Under the Unwed Moon, she wrote, The moon in the force of its pull releases the buried bones.
It was also easy as pie and it hit your eye like a big pizza pie.
The moon can’t help it if it rhymes with June, balloon and sleepy lagoon. For
Robert Graves in his book, White Goddess, the moon was the supreme muse;
the feminine aspect which represented birth and the life force of the imagination.
No argument from me though I was brought up thinking it was
made of green cheese with cows jumping over to the fiddle of hi diddle-diddle.
Gilbert and Sullivan borrowed the moon in Trial By Jury.
The moon in
her phases is found the time, winds and the weather / You cannot eat breakfast all day nor put two
Mondays together.
Here G&S remind us that Monday is a contraction of
Moon-day.
Again, in the Yeoman of the Guard, the moon belongs to
lovers.
It is sung to
the moon / by a love-lorn loon ….. He sipped no sup, and he craved no cup /As he sighed for the love
of a ladye.
In my day, which is close to prehistory, there was Les Paul and Mary Ford's rendition of How High the Moon and Audrey Hepburn singing Moon River. How
many times did Frank Sinatra fly to the moon on gossamer wings? Cat
Stevens walked to fame in Moon Shadow.
It's once in a blue moon that we get such as Beethoven's Piano Sonata Number 14, thirty years later renamed Moonlight Sonata. And then there was Claude Debussy's Clair De Lune.
That word lunacy has a troubled history. In the ancient world a full moon became the culprit for an unsound mind. It also got tied in with female menstruation which was a mystery to unsound males. Lunatic asylums were so named for millennia. It was Barack Obama, in 2012, who signed a bill striking the word from all legislation forever more. It wouldn't surprise if Trump restores it.
Go ahead, let NASA circle the moon. From where I stand it still casts a spell, bitten, gibbous or full.
