‘Moonrise’ is subtitled ‘June 19 1876’, and sees Hopkins observing the crescent moon in the sky one midsummer’s night (or rather ‘not to call night, in the white and the walk of the morning’). Stepped from the stool, drew back from the barrow, of dark Maenefa the mountain Ī cusp still clasped him, a fluke yet fanged him, entangled him, not quit utterly … Or paring of paradisaïcal fruit, lovely in waning but lustreless, The moon, dwindled and thinned to the fringe of a finger-nail held to the candle, Emily Dickinson was never going to write a conventional poem about the moon (or about anything), and the images she uses to describe the moon in this poem are striking and idiosyncratic: a ‘chin of gold’, for starters, but then who else but Dickinson would describe the universe as ‘Her Shoe’? So begins this gloriously evocative poem.
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