Night and Moon

[ Hammer, played by Groucho Marx, speaking :] I’ll meet you tonight under the moon. Oh, I can see you now, you and the moon. You wear a necktie so I’ll know you.

It faded on the crowing of the cock. Some say that ever ’gainst that season comes Wherein our Savior’s birth is celebrated, The bird of dawning singeth all night long; And then, they say, no spirit can walk abroad; The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike, No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm, So hallow’d and so gracious is the time.

The moon has set, and the Pleiades; it is midnight, and time passes, and I sleep alone.

The ghosts of the villages trail in the sky Making a new twilight.

 

Tired nature’s sweet restorer, balmy sleep!

The Darkness has begun. There will be no dawn. J.R.R.

 

John Thomas says good-night to Lady Jane, a little droopingly, but with a hopeful heart.

 

I see, in evening air, How slowly dark comes down on what we do.

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs, But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet.

Set forth three children under the moon, three cherubs drawn by Michelangelo, done this with her legs spread out in the terrible months in the chapel.

And here face downward in the sun To feel how swift how secretly The shadow of the night comes on.

 

It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night

 

If your life at night is good, you think you have / Everything; but, if in that quarter things go wrong, / You will consider your best and truest interests /

Slowly, silently, now the moon

Come to me in the silence of the night;

Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day

 

Slowly, silently, now the moon Walks the night in her silver shoon.

The New York dawn has four columns of mud and a hurricane of black doves that paddle in putrescent waters.

The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.

Ghastly, grim and ancient raven wandering from the Nightly shore—

It was the nightingale, and not the lark,

 

I stroke the beam of my lamp

And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

To begin at the beginning: It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black.