ABSTRACT
The piece was sent by WBY to The Speaker by 1 Jun. 1901. Instead of Tennyson's classical, Biblical, and historical cast, WBY choses a series of women and quasi-divinities from Irish, Welsh, and English legend. There is a strong tinge of autobiography, but it is important to register the fact that in ‘Under the Moon’ many such ‘images’ are things of which ‘I take no pleasure in dreaming’. The poem, which attracted little if any attention from critics in WBY's lifetime, has elicited some modern biographical speculation. In some ways, the literary/mythic paraphernalia of WBY's imaginative past is being questioned here: as E. Engelberg observes, ‘Dreaming of a past is not always useful; indeed, it can be useless because it is painful’. The decision to end the poem by reaching a point where further exploration or symbolic expression simply fails marks a new point of lyric development for WBY, and for the first-person voice in his verse.
