A Summary and Analysis of Hopkins’s ‘Moonrise’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Moonrise’ is subtitled ‘June 19 1876’. It’s not one of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s best-known poems, and may have been left in fragment form; alternatively, it can be read as a short complete poem.

We’re not sure what Hopkins himself intended to do with the poem, since he didn’t see many of his own poems into print during his lifetime. Here is ‘Moonrise June 19 1876’, along with a few thoughts on it which might be considered ‘notes towards an analysis of the poem’.

Summary

I awoke in the Midsummer not to call night, in the white and the walk of the morning:
The moon, dwindled and thinned to the fringe of a finger-nail held to the candle,

The speaker recounts how he woke at Midsummer, in late June, in the period between night time and early dawn, and saw the moon in the sky. The moon was a thin crescent, like the white end of a fingernail (fittingly, the white half-moons that form the innermost part of a fingernail and toenail are technically known as ‘lunulae’, meaning ‘little moons’, because of their crescent shape).

Or paring of paradisaïcal fruit, lovely in waning but lustreless,
Stepped from the stool, drew back from the barrow, of dark Maenefa the mountain;
A cusp still clasped him, a fluke yet fanged him, entangled him, not quit utterly.

The speaker turns to another comparison now, likening the crescent moon to a piece of fruit: perhaps a banana, given the shared curved shape. The moon was beautiful as it waned and grew smaller, but it also lacked ‘lustre’ or shine.

The moon is like someone getting up from a stool where he sat, and stepping back from the mound of ‘Maenefa’, the mountain in Wales where the poet was witnessing this scene.

The moon is still partly restrained or tied to the land, to the mountain; the moon has not managed to ‘quit’ or leave behind the mountain completely.

This was the prized, the desirable sight, unsought, presented so easily,
Parted me leaf and leaf, divided me, eyelid and eyelid of slumber.

The poet concludes by remarking that the sight of the moon in this position was highly desirable, though he had not sought out such a view. It was the sight which greeted him as his eyelids slowly opened in the morning after he had been asleep.

Analysis

‘Moonrise’ is composed in the jaunty sprung rhythm which Hopkins invented, as a way of trying to return English verse to the older traditions of Anglo-Saxon and Middle English (Hopkins himself singled out Langland’s fourteenth-century poem Piers Plowman as a fine example of sprung rhythm).

The long lines are unrhymed, but each concludes with an unstressed or weakly stressed syllable – what’s sometimes called a ‘feminine’ line ending. (‘Feminine’ line endings are those which feature words like ‘mountain’ or ‘morning’; ‘masculine’ lines might end with such words as ‘about’ or ‘terrain’, where the principal stress is on the final syllable of the word, rather than the penultimate syllable.)

Also, although the poem doesn’t rhyme, it does utilise assonance, seen prominently in the second line: ‘dwindled and thinned to the fringe of a finger-nail’. Those short ‘i’ sounds are themselves thin, brief, clipped, suggestive of the narrow shape of the crescent moon in the dawn, or pre-dawn, sky.

The imagery is suffused with Christian connotations, as so often in the poems of Hopkins, who was a Jesuit. (Perhaps his most celebrated poem about God is ‘God’s Grandeur’, which we’ve also analysed.) The idea of the crescent moon being likened to a ‘fringe of a finger-nail’ is extremely modern, prefiguring the modernist comparisons in T. E. Hulme’s poetry or T. S. Eliot’s surprising similes.

Indeed, the idea of the moon being somehow grounded to the landscape and brought ‘down to earth’ prefigures similar images in the proto-imagist lyrics Hulme wrote some three decades later, where the moon is ‘tangled’ and ‘caught’ in the tall mast of the trees at the dock, among other things.

The next image, that of the ‘paring of paradisaïcal fruit’, is ambiguous: does paradise here refer to exotic, tropical lands abroad (thus summoning the banana, whose shape resembles that of the moon’s crescent), or is it meant to summon the Paradise from Christian theology, the Garden of Eden?

Indeed, the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden, although traditionally interpreted as an apple, is sometimes named as a banana (the additional fruity pun on ‘pear’ in ‘paring’ helps the image: rather than naming the fruit as a banana, Hopkins follows the Bible’s lead in leaving this open to interpretation).

Is there also an overturning of Shakespeare’s idyllic vision of love and life, his A Midsummer Night’s Dream? ‘I awoke in the Midsummer not to call night’. No time for dreaming. Perhaps. Although Shakespeare’s title was itself referring to the lovestruck madness that was believed to afflict people on midsummer night: one of the big misconceptions about Shakespeare’s play is that it is set at midsummer, when in fact its title merely refers to the kinds of strange and vivid dreams people were thought to experience around that time of year.

Maenefa, by the way, is a mountain in Wales, where Hopkins was living at the time.

We like ‘Moonrise’, and include it in our pick of the best short Victorian poems. If you enjoyed ‘Moonrise’, then do have a look at that selection for more Victorian poetic loveliness. For more Hopkins, check out our analysis of his fine poem ‘The Starlight Night’.