I Make His Crescent Fill Or Lack - Analysis

Commanding the Moon, Line by Line

The poem speaks in a voice of startling authority: the speaker claims the power to make His Crescent fill or lack and to decide whether His Nature is at Full or only Quarter. On the surface, the central claim is almost literal: the speaker governs the moon’s phases and, by extension, the tides—His Tides do I control. The tone here is crisp, declarative, and faintly imperial, as if the speaker is issuing orders to a subordinate body in the sky.

That confidence is reinforced by the poem’s repeated grammar of control—as I signify, at my Command. Even the moon’s seeming freedom—being superior in the Sky—is reframed as something the speaker can grant or revoke.

Clouds as Curtains: Power over Appearance

The second stanza deepens what kind of control this is. The moon either holds superior or gropes, not because it changes internally, but because it is made to disappear Behind inferior Clouds or to move along A Mist’s slow Colonnade. The choice of inferior is telling: the speaker ranks the sky’s materials like a strict supervisor, and even weather becomes stage machinery. The moon’s dignity depends on visibility, and the speaker claims the power to dim it, hide it, or make it stumble.

Yet there’s a quiet contradiction embedded in this dominance. If the moon is made to grope, it implies vulnerability and dependence—but it also implies that the speaker’s power may be indirect, working through clouds and mist rather than touching the moon itself. Control might be more like manipulation of conditions than absolute rule.

The Mutual Disc: When Control Meets Equality

The poem’s turn arrives with But since. Suddenly the speaker’s superiority is tested by a shared fact: We hold a Mutual Disc and front a Mutual Day. The language shifts from one-sided command to mutuality—shared shape, shared light, shared exposure. This is where the poem’s tension sharpens: how can one body be master if both occupy the same cosmic stage, facing the same day?

The phrase Mutual Disc is deliberately ambiguous. It can point to the literal geometry of moon and earth (or moon and sun), but it also feels like a metaphor for shared identity—two presences that mirror each other too closely for simple hierarchy. The poem begins by insisting on difference (the speaker commands, the moon obeys) and then admits a troubling resemblance.

Despot Without a Name

The ending refuses to settle the question of who rules: Which is the Despot, neither knows, nor even Whose the Tyranny. The tone, once confident, becomes unsettled and almost philosophical. This is not just modesty; it’s a recognition that domination can be structural, built into the relationship itself. If both front a Mutual Day, both are subject to a larger force—or each is a force upon the other, so intertwined that blame becomes impossible to assign.

That’s the poem’s most unsettling insight: tyranny may be real even when no tyrant can be clearly identified. The speaker who bragged of controlling Crescent and Tides ends by admitting that the system they’re in—this shared day, this mutual disc—scrambles the very idea of a single ruler.

A Harder Reading: Is This About Love’s Gravity?

If the sky-logic is also human logic, the poem starts to resemble a relationship in which one person believes they can regulate the other’s fullness and lack—their shine, their retreat, even their emotional Tides. But the last stanza suggests a trap: once two people share a Mutual Day, power becomes reciprocal and coercion becomes hard to locate. The question isn’t only who dominates, but whether intimacy itself can behave like tyranny—quiet, mutual, and still inescapable.