—: Midnight :—
Tonight is as witching a moon
As ever snared me.
At dusk, incredible,
It rose,
Coppering the house-tops,
Bronze-kissing the snow.
And now I am dumb with wonder,
Mazed in its web of
Diaphanous etchery,
Lost in its shower of
Shaken silver.
James Daly (p. 1922-28, etc.)
P: Broom (1922), Contemporary Verse (1922), 1924 (1924), The Wave (1924), The Forge (1925), The New Orient (1925), Poetry (1925+), Transition (1928); A: A Second Contemporary Verse Anthology (1923), Anthology of Magazine Verse (1926); C: The Guilty Sun (1926); plays, reviews, etc.
“Of Cambridge, Massachusetts.” (Contemporary Verse, 1922) “Living in Chicago, studied verse-writing with Haniel Long at the Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh, and play-writing with Professor Baker at Harvard, who produced one of his plays.” (Poetry, 1925) “Now living in New York, is acting minor parts in one of the little-theatre companies, with a view to studying theatrical technique for the writing of plays.” (Poetry, 1926)
It really is midnight while I write this: initially I thought James Daly and James J. Daly were the same poet. I now know they are not.
So many great fragments here: “coppering the house-tops”, “bronze kissing the snow”, and “lost in its shower of shaken silver”. The kinds of phrases that keep on giving long after putting the poem down. Resonant phrases. Lovely use of alliteration as well: “cop…top” and “shower… shaken… silver”. And even a sneaky almost-rhyme, bouncing rose off snow (they don’t really rhyme, of course, but every time I hit snow I feel like a rhyme happened behind my back).
Has just the right combination of being perfectly sensible as a description of the moon rising in the dusk (words that can be described by more words), but enough suggestion to allow resonances to emerge (the results of the poem which are not found in word-sense, but through in-sensible combinations). The scribe de-scribes the “real”: inscribing resonances. Or maybe, in joke form: What’s the difference between a “description” and a “de-scription”? Inscription. Words are funny things: “But why all this talk of trees and stones.”
For James Daly By Dick Whyte Goodnight moon— Goodnight to all the goodnights That weren’t so good. And those others too There must have been some, Like stones and stars: Built to last. (It’s no longer midnight.) xoxo dw
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More poems about the moon . . .