Moon Poetry: Sir Philip Sidney and Giacomo Leopardi

Poems from England and Italy meet, despite centuries between them, on a moonlit hilltop.

"A Wet Moon, Putney Road," 1886, by John Atkinson Grimshaw. Oil on canvas; 24 inches by 42 1/8 inches. At times, it feels like only the moon can understand our struggles. Public Domain

Sunlight is no friend to the sorrowing poet. At least, it doesn’t offer the same sort of sympathy that the moon does. Moonlight is more malleable; it waxes romantic, or its high spirits wane. It can be a somniferous silver or wistful white. Countless poems have been written to a moon that joins the sufferer in his lamentation—to such an extent, in fact, that it seems true that there’s nothing new under the sun, nor beneath the moon either.

However, it’s from this very fact that readers of these poems can draw consolation. It’s a reason we turn to poetry: There, we find words to put to our experiences. If our present experience is one of sorrow, we find comfort in expressions of the same pain and in knowing that we are not alone in our suffering. Some voice of the past has already supplied us with the words that encapsulate our joy or pain.

"Sailing Ship on the Sea at Moonlight," early 1840s, by Ivan Ayvazovsky. Oil on board. Private collection. Public Domain

Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586) offered just such a voice, and “Sonnet 31” of the sonnet sequence “Astrophil and Stella” takes up an old theme of lamenting unrequited love. It’s an example of a pathetic fallacy: a poetic device that attributes human emotion or behavior to inanimate things. In the sonnet, Astrophil (the speaker) grapples with his unrequited love for Stella, addressing the moon in his solitude.

Written in the 1580s, “Astrophil and Stella 31” seems simple enough: the futile bemoaning of one’s fate in a complaint addressed to the moon. But there’s much to consider in this lament, for our worldview and sense of self are prone to be shaken when other hearts remain closed to our own.

With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb’st the skies! How silently, and with how wan a face! What, may it be that even in heav'nly place That busy archer his sharp arrows tries! Sure, if that long-with love-acquainted eyes Can judge of love, thou feel’st a lover’s case, I read it in thy looks; thy languish'd grace To me, that feel the like, thy state descries. Then, ev'n of fellowship, O Moon, tell me, Is constant love deem'd there but want of wit? Are beauties there as proud as here they be? Do they above love to be lov'd, and yet Those lovers scorn whom that love doth possess? Do they call virtue there ungratefulness?

Trudging up to its throne in the heavens, the moon is personified as a fellow sufferer beneath life’s load. The speaker speculates that lovesickness exists even in the heavens. Since his own eyes have likewise been plagued by that malady, he’s a sure judge of it in others.

The enjambment in the second quatrain is telling; it raises the question of the subjectivity of his observation of the moon’s sorrow. In the lines “thy languish'd grace/ To me, that feel the like, thy state descries,” the spilling over of the thought into the next line isolates the words “to me.” This stresses the possibility that it is only the speaker who perceives the moon’s lovelorn state. Perhaps it doesn’t exist at all.

Astrophil concludes his speech with a volley of questions. Why is love seen as weakness, and why is a heart the more virtuous for being unmoved? Why do those who desire love scorn those who offer it? His third question reveals a truth about human nature: All of us yearn to be loved, yet we often treat those who do open their hearts to us none too kindly.

As Father John Bartunek says in his meditation on the crucifixion in the gospel of Mark, love longs to reach out and to act, so we suffer when the other heart is closed. It’s a problem echoed throughout human history.

An engraving of author Sir Phillip Sidney from a 1591 edition of his poem, "Astrophel and Stella." Public Domain

He wrote: “Often this is the most trying of all suffering, because it shackles love. Love always wants to do something, to reach out, to give. But often the other heart—the beloved’s—is closed, and so love is left helpless. Or the situation is so completely out of our hands that, like Christ, all we can do is watch, wait, pray, and suffer.” In this case, when we can only wish them well rather than do well for them, the result is agonizing.

A Fellow Sufferer

However, there is a purpose to our sufferings, and in the case of poetry (and art in general), pain is what shapes the poet. Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837), an Italian poet writing centuries after Sir Philip Sidney, is a perfect example of this fact. He also wrote a poem addressing the moon. During his brief life, Leopardi suffered from frail health and was largely confined to his family home in Recanati, Italy.

A posthumous portrait of Giacomo Leopardi from 1897. Public Domain

Yet, as Moritz Levi, a professor of Romance languages, noted in his article “Silence and Solitude in the Poems of Leopardi,” had Leopardi suffered less, the world would have likely been deprived of a great poet. Levi writes that Leopardi “sang first of all his own misfortunes and his own despair, but behind the manifestations of his individual sufferings, the accents of universal misery and sorrow ring out as clearly as they do in Hamlet’s famous soliloquy.”

Indeed, in his poem “To the Moon” (“Alla luna,” here translated by Frederick Townsend), Leopardi addresses the moon as Sidney did:

O lovely moon, how well do I recall The time,—’tis just a year—when up this hill I came, in my distress, to gaze at thee: And thou suspended wast o'er yonder grove, As now thou art, which thou with light dost fill. But stained with mist, and tremulous, appeared Thy countenance to me, because my eyes Were filled with tears, that could not be suppressed; For, oh, my life was wretched, wearisome, And is so still, unchanged, belovèd moon! And yet this recollection pleases me, This computation of my sorrow’s age. How pleasant is it, in the days of youth, When hope a long career before it hath, And memories are few, upon the past To dwell, though sad, and though the sadness last!

Leopardi’s poem is a reflection upon a past reflection; the poet dwells first upon the moonlit night and the warped appearance of the moon itself due to his tear-clouded sight. The existence of suffering in his life has not changed, and yet added to this suffering, upon the second reflection, is a source of consolation. While one is still young and has years ahead of him, there is comfort in reflecting on past sadness, even if it extends to the present. The poet feels a sense of coherence within his own life as he returns to the same place and object of his contemplation, just as there is a similar coherence between Leopardi’s and Sidney’s poems within the grander scope of human history.

Beyond this, the poet does not explain the precise reason for the comfort he finds in his reflections. Levi notes, “The romantic poets and those who sing of the weariness of life and its sadness—the pessimistic poets—all have addressed their passionate appeals to the moon; they have, it seems, discovered between themselves and her a secret affinity and sympathy.”

Perhaps, then, the poet deliberately keeps this confidence between himself and the moon, which in his poem appears both mutely receptive and gently gracious in filling the grove with light.

Though speaking of his personal suffering, Leopardi directed the poem towards a universal experience in the final lines. He explained why so many solitary sufferers have sought a sympathetic listener in the moon. The moon seems to partake of the same state, a solitary light suspended in the dark. There is a strange consolation in this visible embodiment of one’s sorrowful state. At the same time, the poem gives readers solace, as Sidney’s poem does: The moon has been witness to fellow sufferers in every age. Set apart from earth’s troubles, its ethereal beauty evokes the thought of something beyond ourselves that we can’t quite comprehend.

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