Three times Edgar Allan Poe dissed the Moon

Georges Méliès, A Trip to the Moon, 1902

Pagans, poets, and prognosticators have all marveled at the captivating allure and beauty of the full moon in the sky, but don’t count Edgar Allan Poe among the moon-worshipers.

While others rave about the great moon this Tuesday (called both a “super moon” because it will be full at its closest point to Earth along its slightly elliptical orbit, and a “snow” moon because Native Americans and Europeans associated the February moon with wintry weather), Poe might grouse under his breath as he did in his poem “Evening Star” (1827),

Too cold — too cold for me

Even though it is a cliché for Gothic horror classics to have the full moon set the stage for vampires and werewolves to activate, Poe never contracted their full moon fever.  In fact, rather than triggering magic and supernatural activity, Poe found the earth’s natural satellite to be a big yawn.  Literally.

In “The Sleeper” (1831),

An opiate vapor, dewy, dim, 

Exhales from out her golden rim, 

And, softly dripping, drop by drop, 

Upon the quiet mountain top, 

Steals drowsily and musically 

Into the universal valley

—and lures the entire natural world beneath it into a deep slumber.  Opiates dripping from the moon cause the “universal valley” to fall into a drug-induced daze, until “All Beauty sleeps” and the elements fallen under this spell “would not, for the world, awake.”

In “Tamerlane” (1827), Poe goes a step further in belittling the somnolence he associates with the moon:

What tho’ the moon — the white moon 

Shed all the splendor of her noon, 

Her smile is chilly — and her beam, 

In that time of dreariness, will seem 

(So like you gather in your breath) 

A portrait taken after death.

In the lines preceding, Poe has set up this discussion as the outlook of one who has lost hope, which takes some of the bite away from what follows but, still, the slight is startling in its bluntness.  He pretty much is saying that the iciness of the moon’s glow is reminiscent of Death.

In “Evening Star,” Poe makes a more sparing put-down, and one which more fully lays out the full reason Poe is not bowled over.  Poe notes how the moon, despite emitting a “cold” light (an oft-repeated criticism), still outshines the other stars, making the “planets her slaves” by overpowering them with its brightness, and commanding the tides: “Herself in the Heavens, / Her beam on the waves.”

He acknowledges that the moon presents a plausible, albeit “cold smile,” which he waves off as noted above (“Too cold — too cold for me”).  Then Poe turns to the “Evening Star” (i.e., Venus), and states that he admires its “glory afar,” finding it preferable and a source of pride:

And more I admire 

Thy distant fire, 

Than that colder, lowly light.

Poe seems to understand that the stars, the true stars, which constitute the majority of the points of light in the heavens—including the faintest of them—are made of “fire,” as opposed to the moon, which, for all its luminosity, is merely “light”—and, reflected light, at that!

At a deeper level, Poe is asserting his preference for the underdog: the “enslaved” stars are more noble than their celestial bully.  A still more poetic reading may reveal a message that Poe prefers the possibility, however remote, of an improbable and unreachable passion (“distant fire”), to the nearness and attainability of a more rational prospect (“colder, lowly light”).

The stars are harder to fathom, more challenging to wrap our heads around, than the big glaring moon—and that is precisely why, to someone like Poe, they are also infinitely more interesting and more attractive.