Gatsby monostichs

 

(1)  Wind & Wafting

 

Outside, the wind was loud, and there was a faint flow of thunder along the sound. …. The electric trains, men-carrying, were plunging home through the rain…

-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

 

Wilson’s eyes  turned out to the ashheaps,

where small grey clouds  took on fantastic shape,

and scurried here and there

in the faint  dawn  wind.

-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

 

 

(2) The Moon  Too  Illumines

 

The moon  soaked  with wet light

his tangled clothes upon the floor.

-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

 

They were still under the white plum-tree

and their faces were touching

except for a pale thin ray of moonlight  between.

-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

 

They came to a place  where there were no trees,

and the sidewalk  was  white   with moonlight.

-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

 

And, one from his earlier work:

 

while   the   moon

at its perennial labor of covering the bad complexion of the world,

showered its illicit honey

over the  drowsy  street.

-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned (1922)

 

.

Light upon White

low-hung, blazing,  the stars light the sky,

and over the diamond-dusted snow-crust

the  moon beams       splinter.

-- Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border (1917)

A lunar tautology

Usually there is a summary “That’s that” finality to tautologies, whether used informatively or not;  stylistically, they are bare-bones.  But consider this:

Herod:  The moon has a strange look tonight. … She reels through the clouds like a drunken woman. … Does she not reel like a drunken woman?  She is like a madwoman, is she not?

Herodias:  No;  the moon is like the moon, that is all.

-- Oscar Wilde, Salomé (1891)

Here the barrenness of the pale white, plain round  far-floating body, is reflected in the unyielding tautological formula.



[For the essay to which the above is an appendix, see this:

https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2020/05/informative-tautologies-updated.html  ]

Last-Light Tableaux

like

black    lakes

  troubled by

fantastic moons

-- Oscar Wilde, Salomé (1891)

The sun had sunk now  to the line of woodland;

all the opposing slope was already in twilight,

but the lakes below us   were aflame.

-- Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (1945)

Michael Collins monostich (expanded)

All alone, in radio silence / 

at the dark side  of the moon

[Note:  This astronaut, the "Forgotten Man" of Apollo 11, here presents an impecable, though scarcely emulable, case of Social Distancing.  He was many years ahead of his time.]

[Update:  In his articles about the moon landing,  Fire on the Moon (1969f.), Norman Mailer recounts the moment when Collins finally regained contact with ground-control, some time after Armstrong and Aldrin had begun their televised romp on the surface:

The voice of Collins came into the public address system.  He had been out of radio contact for almost a hour during his trip around the back of the moon, so he did not know how the Extra Vehicular Activity [i.e., the moonwalk] was proceeding. … Now he asked, “How’s it going?”

Capcom: Roger. The EVA is progressing beautifully.  I believe they are setting up the flag now.

Collins:  Great.

The audience [at the Houston center] laughed at this hard pea of envy  beneath twenty mattresses of NASA manners.

It didn’t help when Capcom added, “I guess you’re about the only person around that doesn’t have TV coverage of the scene.”

Phase-shift tableau

Now is the time    of the quarter-moon,

and in the jungle   the changes of the moon

bring   rain .  .   .

[--Peter Matthiessen, The Cloud Forest (1961), p.  242]

Ethan Frome tableau

As he lay there,

the window-pane that faced him

growing gradually lighter,

inlaid upon the darkness,

a square of moon-suffused sky …

Kenosis

Aloft alone

in nightsky selflight

      the moon

beheld below

the darkling pond:

midst unseen reeds;

and yearned.

“Thou noon to my night,

thou lute to my light,

…

…”

-- then stooped in sooth to kiss her,

and sank, and swam, and  shone therein.

[Note:  The poem is incomplete.

But at my time of life,

you never know when you might be gathered;

so here you go.]

Full Moon

I grow old;  I decline, I wane;

the seer, the yellow --

the amber,  --the russet,   -- the burnt-umber leaf.

Yet today -- Vim-filled and vital, and full of sap!

And not needing a nap!!

And this evening,

taking out the recyclables -- lo !

A full moon!

No wonder.

Yet one more unicorn

might I corral,

or ere  I yield  my shield…

Monostich (I)

~

~      ~

the moon in the cusp of a peach-tree,  perfect

~      ~

~

[#monostich]

Babylonians again

If you ever took an astronomy class and paid attention, you know that there are two different ways of defining a month:  sidereal month and synodic month.  Frankly, these tax my retention.  But the real picture is even more complicated.

Shlomo Sternberg, Celestial Mechanics (1969), p. 26:

The return [of the moon] to maximum velocity  takes slightly longer than a sidereal month, and slightly less than a synodic month.  The period of return to maximum velocity is known as the anomalistic period or anomalistic month.

Thus far, a curiosity of astronomy;  one which, one might venture at hazard, was discovered by some persistent fellow with a telescope, prior to the discoveries of quasars or the Red Shift, but probably not all that long before.

But no.   The facts were known in the second century B.C.E. -- and this, in dizzying detail:

Hipparchus gives the relation that 251 synodic periods  are almost exactly equal to 269 anomalistic periods.

Now, at this point, things become seriously weird:

What is most striking is that we find this ratio 251/269 used in a theoretical way in Babylonian tables.

            This startlingly early anticipation does not mean that the ancient Babylonians had been informed of the facts by visiting Space Aliens, as the New Agers would no doubt have it (if they have heard of this story at all).  But it does suggest a preternaturally diligent interest in astronomical niceties.

            And indeed, preternatural is here the operative word.  For as Sternberg several times mentions, the desire for extraordinarily precise knowledge of the celestial facts  stemmed, among the ancient Hebrews, from necessities of religious observance.   Islam likewise has such requirements, a fact perhaps not unconnected with another blazingly insightful observation of the late 9^th/early 10^th century (p. 20):

The motion of the apogee (beyond the effect due to precession) was apparently first discovered by the Arabian astronomer al-Battani.

These, then, are instances in which religion was the midwife of science.  Other instances are familiar from the field of linguistics, where the preservation and explication of sacred Scripture (the Vedas, the Bible, the Koran) was the motivation.