To the Moon
Shelley’s poem is printed in two parts: a stanza of six lines, cast as a single question addressed to the moon, and a two-line fragment that breaks off unfinished. The lines are of uneven length. In the first part ‘weariness’ chimes with ‘companionless’ and ‘earth’ with ‘birth.’ The question asks the moon whether it is pale from the weariness of climbing the sky and gazing on the earth, wandering among stars of a different birth, and forever changing.[1]
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 joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?Thou chosen sister of the Spirit,
That gazes on thee till in thee it pities…
Percy Bysshe Shelley was an English Romantic poet, born at Field Place in Sussex in 1792 and drowned in a boating accident off the Italian coast in 1822, at twenty-nine.[2] He wrote these lines around 1820, and they were first published after his death, in the 1824 volume Posthumous Poems, gathered by his widow, Mary Shelley.[2]
Two Men Contemplating the Moon
Two men in dark, old-fashioned coats stand with their backs to the viewer on a rocky track, close together, both looking toward a slender crescent moon low in a pale evening sky. A large leafless oak, its roots partly torn from the ground, leans across the scene from the left, its bare branches spread above the men. Dark firs rise at the right. The canvas is small, and the figures and trees are painted in browns and greys against the lighter sky.
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Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) was a German Romantic landscape painter, born in Greifswald on the Baltic coast and active for most of his life in Dresden.[1] He treated this subject in several versions; the Metropolitan Museum’s canvas is dated about 1825–30, and the museum acquired it in 2000 through the Wrightsman Fund.[1] An earlier version of about 1819–20, which also shows two men, is in Dresden, and a later version of about 1824, showing a man and a woman, is in Berlin.[2] The painting is oil on canvas and measures about 35 by 44 centimetres.[1]
- Two Men Contemplating the Moon, object page, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The holding museum; source of the accession number 2000.51, the medium, the dimensions, and the open-access status.
- Two Men Contemplating the Moon, Wikipedia. Source for the several versions of the composition and the earlier Dresden version showing a man and a woman.
Musashi Plain Moon
A single fox stands at the edge of a stream among tall autumn grasses, one forepaw raised toward its face as it turns its head down toward its own reflection on the water’s surface. A pale full moon hangs in the sky above, and thin mist lies along the bank. The sheet is a tall, narrow format, printed in muted tans and greys, with the fox and its grey reflection accented by mica; a title cartouche and the artist’s signature and seal run down one side.
Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839–1892) was a Japanese artist of the late Edo and Meiji periods, widely regarded as one of the last masters of the ukiyo-e woodblock print.[2] One Hundred Aspects of the Moon is a series of a hundred prints, each connected to the moon, published between 1885 and 1892.[2] “Musashi Plain Moon” is the ninety-first print in the series.[2] The impression reproduced here belongs to the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art, which holds it in the Robert O. Muller Collection; the print itself, made in 1891, is long out of copyright.[1]
- Musashi Plain Moon, from One Hundred Aspects of the Moon, object page, Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art. The holding museum; source of the object number S2003.8.3050, the medium, and the dimensions.
- One Hundred Aspects of the Moon, Wikipedia. Source for Yoshitoshi’s dates, the series of one hundred prints, its publication between 1885 and 1892, and the print’s place in the series.