The Quiet Moon: Pathways to an Ancient Way of Being

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Breathtaking prose. Sometimes witty in a sort of delightful phosphor spark. Even though the Dorset climate is different than here in Calcutta, I wrote down some remarkable similarities too such as the changes in flowering time and the appearance of birds during changes in seasons- called the phenological mismatch- thanks to climate change. In this short poem ‘(Sound travels so far)’, Hadfield plays with greyscale font of various sizes to suggest a state of heightened listening. The typographic variances also register shifts of volume, amplification and diminuendo. Like Oswald, she plays with graphic codes for volume. If the shrinking font in ‘A Star Here and a Star There’ suggests distance and quiet, in her later long poem, ‘Tithonus’, from Falling Awake (2016), Oswald uses fading coloured font to convey a dimming of sound, a visual language for quietening. In the poem’s final lines, the ink gradually fades, so that the concluding word, “appearing”, is almost invisible, printed in the very lightest shade of grey, as dawn, and light, appear. This fading out produces in visual language an aural effect, the suggestion of diminuendo, in the way that bold or capital letters, larger font size or italics can suggest a louder volume. The size of the font increases again, and now swans (white) appear, and then a gap in the poem, a pause, white space, creating a sense of quiet suspense as we listen again in anticipation, before the poem shifts into another time. Hadfield plays with white space, indenting lines and adding space between lines instead of conventional punctuation to suggest pauses as well as shifts in sound: In his great poem ‘Frost at Midnight’, written in February 1798, under a new moon, Coleridge is listening. And inviting us to listen with him. To the silence of frost on a windless night. Broken by the call of an owlet. His ear notices that it’s an owlet, rather than an owl. A young owl. Inside the cottage, it is calm. His baby son Hartley slumbers in his arms. The poem that emerges is a listening meditation. Listen.

Celtic Full Moons – FAQ’s What are the Celtic Full Moon Names, and how do they vary across different tribes?

In a lecture about Ted Hughes given at Oxford University in November 2020, and available online, Oswald describes the white space at the end of a line as a listening space: “A good poem gives up its knowingness at the end of each line, inhales, listens and then starts again.” The end of a line is figured as a moment of breathing, and of listening; the poem itself is listening, listening out, into the silence, into the whiteness of space; listening out for what will happen next. These lines, this listening, is from Oswald’s sonnet ‘Wood not yet out’. The line break after “listening down” invites the reader to listen down to the next line, “to the releasing branches”. That word “down” in “listening down” gives direction to an act which is not usually directed downwards: we don’t usually “listen down the lane” as we might “look down the lane”, more usually we listen to or for something, sometimes listen up, or, perhaps, we might just listen.

That repeated word “loud”, describing the “owlet’s cry”, primes our ears, or rather, our mind’s ear, or what Robert Frost called the imagining ear, to listen for a certain pitch of sound, heightening the shift into quiet that follows. Through the calm, the “strange and extreme silentness”, a thin blue flame comes into focus. Perfectly still. Not a quiver. Like the string of a lute, silent in stillness. Only the film of soot is moving now, fluttering on the grate, not still as in quiet, but, with a slight adjustment, still fluttering, moving, continuing to move, against the grate of the fire. It is “the sole unquiet thing”. Nature approaches her peak during a summer of short nights and bright days – a time when the ancient Celts claimed their wives and celebrated Lughnasadh. With the descent into winter comes the sadness of December’s Cold Moon. Trees stand bare and creatures shiver their way to shelter as the Dark Days creep in once more and the cycle restarts. Nature approaches her peak during a summer of short nights and bright days – this was when the ancient Celts claimed their wives and celebrated Lugnasad. Star sound carried across vast distances, amplified by the poet’s imagining ear, to the intimacy of a whisper, “a faint thing”, a candle’s gentle sputter, “too faint to read by”. Moving between eye and ear, light and sound, the poem explores what it means to perceive stars, shifting scale and register, oscillating between far away and intimate. ‘A Star Here and a Star There’ is the first of the concluding sequence of poems in Oswald’s third collection Woods etc. (2005) that explore the further reaches of our skies, from moon to the deep silence of space, including ‘Moon Hymn’, ‘Various Portents’, ‘Excursion to the Planet Mercury’, and ‘Sonnet’, the final poem in the collection, which describes “Spacecraft Voyager 1 boldly gone / into Deep Silence”. The Celtic Full Moon Names refer to specific names and meanings associated with the full moon in the Celtic tradition, which vary across different Celtic regions and tribes.July’s full moon is the Claiming Moon or Horse Moon, a time to reflect on life and bring more positivity into it. As you can see from the Celtic full moon names above, they often named them after events, such as harvest season. This is typical of many ancient societies as they often had big celebrations during these periods. The August full moon was known to the ancient Celts as the Grain Moon or the Dispute Moon. August was the time of the first harvest of the year, the Celtic and to celebrate the occasion with feasts and festivals. It was also a time to resolve disputes between neighbors. This tradition of summertime legalese continued well into the 19th Century in different parts of Britain, where August 1st (aka Lughnasadh & Lammas) was a traditional time to collect rent and pay workers. Today the August Full Moon is a time to celebrate all your work and progress during the year, knowing that you are also prepared for the months ahead.