Clair de Lune by Roland Leighton

Lenguador, 11 months ago

I'll admit, I had to look up the definition of lea when reading the poem.

I particularly liked these 2 lines:

And down the whispering river
Moon-bright dimples quiver

To me, the river feels nervous, excited, and vulnerable.

These lines for me were a garden-path sentence:

The poplar's blackness bolder
	 Against the dawning sky,

Poplar trees aren't native in my region of the world, and I interpreted this as "The poplar's blackness" being the shadow cast by the poplar. So I was taken out of the poem when I saw that in the next line the author meant the silhouette of the tree (or perhaps the colour of the bark, there seem to be black variants).
Though, now that I'm reading the lines correctly, I do appreciate the imagery evoked.

I also don't understand the line And laughter of dead showers, I assume that is referencing rain, but I'm not sure.

natarey, 11 months ago

My reading of the poem has generally been that the speaker is looking over a river at night under the full moon, and remembering happier times spent there some time in the past — the “laughter of dead showers” are part of the “passionate pale-lit hours” that encompass wood and lea. Perhaps the dead showers (dead because they are in an unrecoverable past moment) are laughing as part of a cheerful memory of being caught in the rain with someone else.

In the second stanza, the tone turns colder, and the excited, anticipatory, summer-like imagery gives way to a bleak and silent December as the dawn comes. It seems to be a “times were happier once, but all that is gone now” poem.

This matches up with the context in which the poem was written — this is a war poem by a young man who died in the trenches of France during WWI, and he may have been looking out over a river that he’d once visited before in better days.