Tonight's Harvest Moon

The moon, like a flower in heaven's bower, with silent delight sits and smiles on the night.

                                                                   from William Blake's poem, Night

Georgia Sea Island moon rise over McQueens Island east of Savannah, ca. 1950 

This bright harvest moon

keeps me walking all night long

around the little pond

                                                                          Basho


The full Harvest Moon casts its shadow across the planet tonight. As the orb emerges from the sea, coastal residents experience the sublime event precisely as it has been viewed by humans for thousands of years. There at land's end under a star-filled dome the timeless sound of surf captures and commands our consciousness and wraps us in mystery and wonder. Add a moon rise and all reason flees.

The moon, like a flower in heaven's bower, with silent delight sits and smiles on the night.

                                                                           William Blake

It is the Harvest Moon! On gilded vanes 

And roofs of villages, on woodland crests 

And their aerial neighborhoods of nests 

Deserted, on the curtained window-panes

Of rooms where children sleep, on country lanes 

And harvest-fields, its mystic splendor rests!

Gone are the birds that were our summer guests, 

With the last sheaves return the laboring wains!

All things are symbols: the external shows 

Of Nature have their image in the mind, 

As flowers and fruits and falling of the leaves;

The song-birds leave us at the summer’s close, 

Only the empty nests are left behind, 

And pipings of the quail among the sheaves.

                                                                            Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Sources

Photos and Illustrations:
Lowcountry moonrise, Fort Pulaski National Monument Handbook, 1954

Text:

William Blake quotation, from Songs of Innocence and Experience, 1789
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Harvest Moon, public domain, www.poets.org
Basho haiku, gist.github.com, originally from wed.archives.org