Au clair de la lune
Mon ami Pierrot,
Prete moi ta plume
Pour ecrire un mot;
Ma chandelle est morte,
Je n'ai plus de feu,
Ouvre moi ta porte,
Pour l'amour de Dieu.
Lend me thy pen
To write a word
In the moonlight,
Pierrot, my friend!
My candle's out,
I've no more fire;—
For love of God
Open thy door!
Late, late yestreen I saw the new moone,
Wi' the auld moon in hir arme.
Thomas Percy—Reliques. Sir Patrick Spens.
See also Scott—Minstrelsy of the Scottish
Border
Jove, thou regent of the skies.
Day glimmer'd in the east, and the white Moon
Hung like a vapor in the cloudless sky.
Samuel Rogers—Italy. The Lake of Oeneva.
Again thou reignest in thy golden hall,
Rejoicing in thy sway, fair queen of night!
The ruddy reapers hail thee with delight:
Theirs is the harvest, theirs the joyous call
For tasks well ended ere the season's fall.
Roscoe—Sonnet. To the Harvest Moon.
The sun was gone now; the curled moon was like a little feather
Fluttering far down the gulf.
D. G. Rossetti—The Blessed Damozel. St. 10.
That I could clamber to the frozen moon
And draw the ladder after me.
Quoted by Schopenhauer in Parerga and Paralipomena.
Good even, good fair moon, good even to thee;
I prithee, dear moon, now show to me
The form and the features, the speech and degree,
Of the man that true lover of mine shall be.
Scott—Heart of Mid-Lothian. Ch. XVII.
If thou would'st view fair Melrose aright,
Go visit it by the pale moonlight;
For the gay beams of lightsome day
Gild, but to flout, the ruins gray.
Scott—Lay of the Last Minstrel. Canto II. St 1.
The moon of Rome, chaste as the icicle
That's curded by the frost from purest snow.
Coriolanus. Act V. Sc. 3. L. 65.
How slow
This old moon wanes! she lingers my desires,
Like to a step-dame or a dowager
Long withering out a young man's revenue.
Midsummer Night's Dream. Act I. Sc. 1. L. 3.
Therefore the moon, the governess of floods,
Pale in her anger, washes all the air,
That rheumatic diseases do abound:
And through this distemperature we see
The seasons alter.
Midsummer Night's Dream. Act II. Sc. 1.
L. 103.
It is the very error of the moon:
She comes more nearer earth than she was wont,
And makes men mad.
The wat'ry star.
That orbed maiden, with white fire laden,
Whom mortals call the moon.
The young moon has fed
Her exhausted horn
With the sunset's fire.
Shelley—Hellas. Semi-Chorus II.
Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven, and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth,—
And ever changing, like a joyous eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?
With how sad steps, O moon, thou climb'st the skies!
How silently, and with how wan a face!
The Moon arose: she shone upon the lake,
Which lay one smooth expanse of silver light;
She shone upon the hills and rocks, and cast
Upon their hollows and their hidden glens
A blacker depth of shade.
Transcendental moonshine.
Found in Life of John Sterling. P. 84. (People's Ed.) Applied to the teaching of Coleridge. Said to have been applied by Carlyle to Emerson.
I with borrow'd silver shine,
What you see is none of mine.
First I show you but a quarter,
Like the bow that guards the Tartar:
Then the half, and then the whole,
Ever dancing round the pole.
As like the sacred queen of night,
Who pours a lovely, gentle light
Wide o'er the dark, by wanderers blest,
Conducting them to peace and rest.
Thomson—
