… enters Westminster Abbey; and on the occasion, here’s one of his poems, “The Harvest Moon.”
You can hear it recited here, at 3:35.
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The Harvest Moon
The flame-red moon, the harvest moon,
Rolls along the hills, gently bouncing,
A vast balloon,
Till it takes off, and sinks upward
To lie on the bottom of the sky, like a gold doubloon.
The harvest moon has come,
Booming softly through heaven, like a bassoon.
And the earth replies all night, like a deep drum.
So people can’t sleep,
So they go out where elms and oak trees keep
A kneeling vigil, in a religious hush.
The harvest moon has come!
And all the moonlit cows and all the sheep
Stare up at her petrified, while she swells
Filling heaven, as if red hot, and sailing
Closer and closer like the end of the world.
Till the gold fields of stiff wheat
Cry `We are ripe, reap us!’ and the rivers
Sweat from the melting hills.
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Note first the soft rolling sounds of the first three lines, not a hard letter among them, except for those three almost hidden little Ts: harvest, gently, vast. Ts hidden inside, or dropped lightly at the end, of their word. So the language will follow the smoothness of the moon as it softens the earth’s “stiff wheat” and petrified sheep, and melts the earth’s hills, making us ready for gathering up as if at “the end of the world.”
And how strange that we want to be taken – ‘We are ripe – reap us!’ We’ve kept “a kneeling vigil,” “a religious hush,” in front of the ravishing moon. Like the moon, we “sink upward,” melting into the earth in hope of transcendence. Our deep earth-drum resonates with the moon as it comes to cast a final calm over all of our laboring as it takes us.
she swells
Filling heaven, as if red hot, and sailing
Closer and closer like the end of the world.
So don’t watch this if you plan to see the film, but the final Wagnerian scene of Melancholia comes to mind here, the planet Melancholia sailing closer and closer and it is the end of the world…
But this is no disaster movie: For at least one of the characters, the heaven-filling swell of the planet Melancholia is a kind of fulfillment, something sought after as beautiful and true.