Guiding Question: Comment on the links between the mother, the moon, and the speaker.

Thesis: Jamie, if one assumes her to be the speaker of the poem, uses the eponymous ‘Moon’ as an extended metaphor for her mother, and its associated connotations of distance to explore their relationship through imagery and structure.

Point 1: Jamie hints at her fractured relationship with her mother through the speaker’s uncertainty, a trait that can be inferred from her choice of verbs. (‘It seemed’, ‘appeared inclined’, and ‘I sensed’). Link to fear of presumption/assumption felt by a child wanting to impress a distant parent. Passivity of narrative voice.

Link to change in mood (introduction of agency, self-assurance, and confrontation) in the penultimate quatrain. (‘I said’).

Point 2: Delve into the moon as an extended metaphor. Connotations of distance, of ever-presence, of a force of nature constantly bearing down on someone, positioned above, judging. (‘The moon slipped into my attic room as an oblong of light’). Gentle connotations of ‘slipped’, but also deliberateness, the motion of which is hinted at by internal rhyme (‘Moon’ and ‘room’). ‘Oblong of light’ is an odd metaphor, the purity and hope of light is perverted into a strange shape.

Point 3: Jamie reminds us how overlooked the duality of maternal/filial relationships is through the rhetorical question in the final quatrain. (‘Are they quite beyond you, the simple words of love’). ‘Quite’ as an intensifier implies a spiteful tone from which a history of absent communication/affection can be inferred, while ‘simple’ seems derivative compared to the weight/gravity of love; it undermines the vulnerability required to confess it. Perhaps both the mother and the daughter misunderstand each other. (‘Say them’) uses the imperative to connote pleading and desperation rather than a command, the need for maternal/filial love.