Daylight and Moonlight
At noon, the speaker sees a faint, white moon and reads a poet's mystic song that seems ghostlike. When night falls, the moon floods the landscape with light, and the remembered song reveals its grace and mystery.
By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow · Genre: Lyric Poetry, Meditative Poetry · 179 words
First lines
In broad daylight, and at noon, / Yesterday I saw the moon / Sailing high, but faint and white, / As a school-boy's paper kite.
In broad daylight, yesterday, / I read a Poet's mystic lay; / And it seemed to me at most / As a phantom, or a ghost.
But at length the feverish day / Like a passion died away, / And the night, serene and still, / Fell on village, vale, and hill.
Then the moon, in all her pride, / Like a spirit glorified, / Filled and overflowed the night / With revelations of her light.
Genres
- Lyric Poetry — Five rhymed quatrains convey a speaker's changing impressions of the moon and a poet's song.
- Meditative Poetry — The speaker reflects on how night makes a song's grace and mystery perceptible after it seemed ghostlike in daylight.
Tags
moonlight · night · reading poetry · perception
What this Textopian page supports
Daylight and Moonlight is listed on Textopian as a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, dated Date unknown.
This source record anchors work identity, reading entry points, and catalog context for checking claims about the work.
- Work type: Poem
- Author: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- Date: Date unknown
- Language: English
- Genres: Lyric Poetry, Meditative Poetry
- Length: 179 words
- Structure: 1 section, 5 paragraphs
- Reading fit: Fairly Easy (7th Grade)
Good citation fit
- Work identity for Daylight and Moonlight by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- Canonical title URL and first readable passage URL
- Genre and topic classification from the Textopian catalog
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