Emily Dickinson asked the Moon which phase was best, and it refused both
In eight compressed lines, Dickinson stages a riddle: full Moon or crescent? The Moon's answer is neither. What we have not yet reached outshines what we hold, and grabbing the prize wipes away its glow. It is a whole theory of longing packed into a question and a shrug.
The poem opens like a schoolroom quiz and then swerves. Asked to choose between the complete disc and the thin sliver, the Moon itself replies, "Neither -- said the Moon --", and goes on to argue that the best thing is the one still missing. Achieve it, the speaker warns, and you rub off its sheen. Fullness, in this picture, is a kind of loss.
The second stanza pushes the idea further in clipped, almost legal diction. Fruition does not come from holding on; attaining should make us shudder; rapture decays once it arrives. The last line, "He is Prism born", gives the thought a physical image: delight behaves like light split by a prism, beautiful precisely because it is scattered and passing, never something to pin down. The dashes break the lines into gasps, so the reader feels the reaching rather than the arrival.
That fondness for the unrealised fits how the Poetry Foundation has summed up her work: an elliptical language for what was possible but not yet realised. Her technique is on show here too, with short acerbic lines, lean description and rhymes that only half land, the features now counted among her innovations.
The irony is that Dickinson lived the poem's lesson in her own career. Of nearly 1,800 poems, only about 10 appeared in print while she was alive, and her circle barely knew she wrote. After she died in 1886, her younger sister Lavinia found the manuscripts in a desk. The first selection, edited by Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd in 1890, smoothed her punctuation and form to suit the tastes of the day. Only in 1955, when Thomas H. Johnson assembled The Poems of Emily Dickinson, did readers get versions closer to what she had written, dashes and all.
Source: Which is the best -- the Moon or the Crescent?
