I See the Moon... Trivia Quiz

Answer: Annabel Lee

Edgar Allan Poe composed "Annabel Lee" sometime during 1849, a few months before he would die at the age of forty, and its first appearance in print was as part of Poe's obituary in New York's "Daily Tribune". Most scholars have speculated that the poem was inspired by the death of his wife Virginia Clemm, who had passed away two years before Poe. However, others have speculated that the inspiration may have been the poet Frances Sargent Osgood (with whom Poe had been exchanging romantic poems), Sarah Elmira Royster (a childhood sweetheart of Poe's and his fiance at the time of his death), or Sarah Helen Whitman or Sarah Anna Lewis (both of whom had been romantic interests of Poe at different points of his life). However, Virginia Clemm is the only individual of the five who was ever married to him and who died during Poe's lifetime. These two facts coincide with facts mentioned in the poem itself.

The theme of "Annabel Lee", the death of a beautiful woman, is the theme of many of Poe's pieces, including the poems "The Raven", "Ulalume", and "To One in Paradise" as well as the short story "Ligeia". Poe had written that this theme is "the most poetical topic in the world".

The final stanza of "Annabel Lee" consists of the following:

"For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling--my darling--my life and my bride,
In her sepulchre there by the sea--
In her tomb by the sounding sea."

Answer: Percy Bysshe Shelley

"The Waning Moon" was published after Percy Shelley's death by his wife Mary Shelley, the author of the epistolary gothic novel "Frankenstein". To allow readers to see several of Percy Shelley's unprinted and unfinished pieces, Mary Shelley published "The Waning Moon" in two different posthumous collections of her husband's work, once in 1829 and again in 1834. She is the one who gave the poem its title.

The entire poem is as follows:

"And like a dying lady, lean and pale,
Who totters forth, wrapped in a guazy veil,
Out of her chamber, led by the insane
And feeble wanderings of her fading brain,
The moon arose up in the murky east,
A white and shapeless mass."

Occasionally, "The Waning Moon" is published as "To the Moon", and under this title, again composed by Mary Shelley, the above stanza is joined by this following stanza:

"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?"

However, sometimes the stanza immediately above is published all by itself under the title "To the Moon" or just simply "The Moon".

Then, to add still more confusion, sometimes "To the Moon" consists of the stanza beginning "Art thou pale for weariness" and then the fragmented beginning of another stanza: "Thou chosen sister of the Spirit, / That gazes on thee till in thee it pities . . . ". This version was published in 1870 by W. M. Rosetti in yet another posthumous publication of Shelley's works.

Whether any of these stanzas were meant to go together or not, we can never know, but what is apparent is that these stanzas represent a fragment or fragments of unfinished or perhaps abandoned plans and ideas.

Furthermore, their words provide insight into Percy Shelley's character. Like the moon he describes, he often felt alone, unable to find people that were as he was in mind and spirit, and he often struggled with constantly changing moods and emotions represented by the moon's own constantly changing phases.

Answer: Sir Philip Sidney

Sir Philip Sidney--courtier, soldier, scholar, and poet--lived from 1554 to 1586, and some critics have argued that his "Astrophil and Stella" (or "Astrophel and Stella") is the best sonnet sequence in the English language. The sonnet sequence is patterned after the Italian poet Petrarch's idea of writing several sonnets about one man who chases a woman he loves only to be frustrated by her refusal to love him in return. While all of the sonnets in a sequence are concerned with the same two individuals, each sonnet is written so that it may be read as an individual poem as well. In Sidney's sequence, Stella rejects Astrophil's offers of love, attention, and affection; however, Astrophil cannot escape his desire for her. His situation is represented through their names: "Astrophil" is from the Greek for "star lover", and "Stella" is from the Latin for "star"; thus, he is fated to pursue her and love her, but also fated never to have her, as they "speak different languages", so to speak.

In Sonnet #31, he notices the moon appears sad, deduces that the moon is suffering from unrequited love as he is, and begins speaking with the moon hoping they may commiserate with each other. In this moment, Astrophil cannot have his star and, therefore, settles for the company of the moon. He then makes such statements that represent his frustration: love is a behavior that demonstrates a lack of intelligence, beautiful women are prideful, women love to be loved but don't want to give love in return, and women are ungrateful and consider such a quality to be a good thing.

Sidney also wrote one of the greatest prose romances in English--"Arcadia"--and one of the most important pieces of English literary criticism--"A Defense of Poesy". He was not the most prolific of English Renaissance writers, but nearly everything he wrote had such a tremendous impact. He's not as well known by the general population of today's world because he is eclipsed by William Shakespeare. Other great writers from the same time period--such as Christropher Marlowe and Edmund Spenser--suffer the same predicament.

Answer: T. E. Hulme

Thomas Ernest Hulme (pronounced like "Hume") (1883-1917) wrote "Autumn" most likely sometime between 1908 and 19010. The very short poem is as follows:

"A touch of cold in the Autumn night --
I walked abroad,
And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge
Like a red-faced farmer.
I did not stop to speak, but nodded,
And round about were the wistful stars
With white faces like town children."

"Autumn", and other poems he composed like this one, lead scholars to see Hulme as one of the earliest modernist poets as well as perhaps the first imagist poet. Traditionally, poets prior to Hulme had relied on recognizable poetic forms and stanzas as well as rhyme and regular meter. Hulme, on the other hand, relies on none of these. Furthermore, poems often incorporated moral lessons, lengthy reflections, or impassioned rhetoric. Again, Hulme avoids all of this to relate briefly how the speaker of the poem leaves town to wander in the cool evening of the surrounding countryside; then, the speaker offers no transcendent meaning to his encounter with the moon but rather simply nods and comments on how the moon and stars look like faces to him. Thus, the poem resists traditional explication or explanation. Perhaps, a reader may associate an autumn moon with the harvest moon and farmers and speculate on the contrast of red and white and what those colors symbolize, but the poem itself offers nothing explicit to suggest such associations are intentional by the poet himself. Instead, the poem is a few lines consisting of images and sensations.

Hulme wrote a small number of poems and was known during his time as a scholar of aesthetic philosophy who lectured and wrote criticism concerning art, literature, and politics. He is credited with having had a tremendous influence on more well-known modernists, such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, as well as other poets of the time like Robert Frost, who lived in England for a while. Many also consider him "the Father of Imagism".

On September 28, 1917, he was near Nieuwpoort, Belgium, when he was hit directly by a large shell. The pieces of his body that could be gathered were buried in a military cemetery in Koksijde, Belgium.

Answer: Carl Sandburg

Carl Sandurg's poem "Moonset" is perfectly representative of his unique style--short, abrupt, fragmentary, rhymeless, and lacking of any traditionally recognizable meter. Yet, it is rich in thought-provoking imagery.

"Leaves of poplars pick Japanese prints against the west.
Moon sand on the canal doubles the changing pictures.
The moon's good-by ends pictures.
The west is empty. All else is empty. No moon-talk at all now.
Only dark listening to dark."

"Moonset" fits well with the modernist mood of several American writers affected by the loss of the structure and order of Western society following World War I. However, Sandburg was capable of other moods as well. Consider his even shorter piece "Fog":

"The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on."

Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) was one of the few American poets to achieve somewhat of a celebrity status, as did Robert Frost and Maya Angelou. Speaking at a ceremony to honor Sandburg's life following his death, Lyndon Johnson declared, "Carl Sandburg was more than the voice of America, more than the poet of its strength and genius. He was America". Sandburg was also celebrated by critics and scholars during his time as he is one of a handful to have won three Pulitzer Prizes--two for his poetry (the collection "Cornhuskers" in 1919 and the collection "Complete Poems" in 1951) and one for his biography "Abraham Lincoln: The War Years" published in 1939.

Answer: Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy's poem "In the Moonlight" relies on his frequent strategy of using a dialogue format or conversational tone as the observer questions the "lonely workman" who responds in turn to the observer's queries. The observer notices how the man visiting a grave does "stare and stare" at only one grave and is so engrossed that he sees no other graves or visitors are around him. The observer notices the visitor's eyes are "gaunt" and seem to beg for a sight of the one buried there. After the one gazing upon the grave explains how he would rather gaze upon the spirit of the one in this grave than he would upon any living person in the world, he despairingly laments that he will never see her again. The observer of the grave's visitor deduces that this woman must have been someone he loved dearly. However, he is incorrect in his assumption. The grave's visitor explains that he is now living in regret over what might have been, that he wasted every opportunity to love this woman because he foolishly chased after so many others.

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) published many novels during the Victorian era that are still popular today, such as "The Return of the Native", "Tess of the D'Urbervilles", "The Mayor of Casterbridge", "Far from the Madding Crowd", "Under the Greenwood Tree", "The Trumpet Major", and "Jude, the Obscure". His novels were controversial during his lifetime not only because of their non-traditional approaches to relationships and marriages but also because of their pessimistic themes. The world, according to how Hardy presented it in his novels, was ruled by a blind, uncaring, and cruel fate. He eventually abandoned novel writing altogether around the turn of the century, having grown frustrated with the public's failure to appreciate his books. His last novel, "Jude the Obscure", was publicly burned by the Bishop of Wakefield; Victorian society was unready for this story: Jude lives with a woman who is married to someone else, they have children together, one of the children kills his siblings and then commits suicide, the woman blames herself for having gone against God's commandments and returns to a loveless marriage, and Jude eventually dies.

In the twentieth century, Hardy turned to poetry, which is what he claimed he always wanted to write in the first place. As "Hap", "The Darkling Thrush", "The Convergence of the Twain", and "Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave" will attest, he continued his pessimistic themes. However, Hardy rejected society's labeling him a pessimist; he claimed he was a "meliorist", someone who believes the world is in bad shape but can become better with human effort.

Answer: Sylvia Plath

"The Moon and the Yew Tree" is part of Sylvia Plath's collection of poems "Ariel", which was posthumously published in 1965, Plath having committed suicide two years before. The poem was composed years prior to the publication of "Ariel" and refers to events and feelings from an even earlier time in Plath's life. Plath's father, Otto, died from complications due to diabetes in 1940, just a few days after Plath had celebrated her eighth birthday. Beginning with this event, Plath began not only to lose her religious faith but also began to realize how isolated she felt from her mother. Years later, Plath would write this poem after meeting Ted Hughes, the poet she eventually married. Hughes challenged her to write something about "the full moon setting onto a large yew that grows in the churchyard".

Appropriately, Plath uses the yew tree in the poem to represent her dead father; the yew tree in Celtic mythology was associated with death. Plath writes in the poem, "The yew tree points up, it has a Gothic shape. / The eyes lift after it and find the moon. / The moon is my mother". Again, this symbolism is appropriate. The moon provides light, but its light is cold and provides no warmth. Its light provides only a view of the world that is various shades of black and blue. In real life, Plath looked to her mother for comfort and guidance after her father's death and found none. She explains this in the poem with words like "The moon is no door". The moon provides her no means of escape from the dark world in which she finds herself. Plath, in the poem, writes, "I simply cannot see where there is to get to", and the light of the moon leads her back to the "blackness and silence" of the yew tree--back to death.

Answer: Emily Dickinson

While humankind have for centuries imagined a "man in the moon", Dickinson takes that old cliche and manages to do something new with it. Using words like "gold", "beryl", and "amber", she suggests something precious and rare about the moon's beauty, but she also suggests something ethereal and mystical about it as well by describing its visitation as one that gradually materializes before our eyes. Its chin emerges from the darkness to be followed slowly over a period of several nights by its forehead, then its cheeks, then its eyes, and on and on. Interestingly, too, the moon is female rather than male. The rest of the night sky is eventually described as parts of the moon's body, given that the moon itself is but the face. The firmament is the moon's bonnet, the stars are "trinkets at her belt", and the universe itself is her shoe.

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) learned music at an early age--piano and voice--and was tremendously influenced by the hymns she encountered at church and played at home for her family, usually softly after they had retired for the night. It was not the content or messages within the hymns that had an impact on her but rather their structure and rhythm; the meter of her poems often allows them to be sung not only to the tunes of older American hymns but to many other later secular songs. For example, one can sing "Because I could not stop for Death -- / He kindly stopped for me -- / The Carriage held but just Ourselves -- And Immortality" to the tune of "The Yellow Rose of Texas", the theme song to the American TV show "Gilligan's Island", "When Johnny Comes Marching Home", or "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing" (the Coca-Cola song). Try it!

Answer: Edwin Arlington Robinson

E. A. Robinson (1869-1935) turned to writing poetry when he returned home from Harvard. His world was crumbling and he found a refuge in the elegance and beauty of poetry. Although the best of his poems focused on the wasted, blighted, impoverished lives of those struggling in society around him, he believed poetry lifted up its subject matter and brought a dignity to the lives about which he wrote. Thus, he insisted on writing poetry in a traditional format with meter, rhyme, and elevated diction. This approach to poetry frequently resulted in his being perceived as out-of-step with current trends, for more and more writers were relying on free verse and non-traditional formats in the modern world.

Robinson at first resorted to self-publication to try to establish himself as a poet. His first collection of poems, "The Torrent; and the Night Before", which contained "Luke Havergal", was published in 1896. He followed that a year later with the collection "The Children of the Night", which was a personal favorite of Theodore Roosevelt's son Kermit and contained such poems as "Kosmos" and "Richard Cory". Despite publishing eight more volumes of poetry, Robinson was not able to achieve secure financial standing until the publication of his 1921 "Collected Poems" won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1922. "The Man Who Died Twice" won a second award for him in 1925, and "Tristram" won a rare third Pulitzer Prize in 1928.

Answer: In Memoriam

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) spent thirteen years of his life composing "In Memoriam". While attending University at Cambridge, Tennyson encountered a group of poetry-loving students who referred to themselves as "the Apostles". Among them was Arthur Henry Hallam, who would develop a great friendship with Tennyson and become engaged to Tennyson's sister. However, before he could marry her, he died of a cerebral hemorrhage during a trip with his father to Vienna, Austria, in 1833. This event combined with various new scientific discoveries and theories published around this time led Tennyson into a tremendous depression and a long period of religious doubt. He struggled and battled with the concepts of death and the existence of life after death but apparently emerged on the other side of his conflicts with peace, acceptance, and his own understanding of Christianity.

The publication of "In Memoriam" in 1850 led to Tennyson's great fame in Great Britain, Ireland, and the United States. Queen Victoria was so impressed by the poem that, following the death of William Wordsworth, she appointed Tennyson Poet Laureate in November of 1850, a post he held until his death in 1892. Quite significantly, the position came with an annual stipend of 10,000 pounds. After the death of Prince Albert, Victoria's husband, in 1861, the Queen found great comfort from her frequent readings of "In Memoriam", and in 1862, she requested a personal meeting with Tennyson to discuss his poem. In 1884, she bestowed upon Tennyson a peerage so that he became Lord Tennyson, and in 1892, following his death, his body was entombed in Westminster Abbey.