Impressions La Fuite De La Lune - Analysis

A still world that isn’t fully still

The poem’s central move is to build a landscape that appears perfectly hushed, then reveal the small, piercing signs that the hush is fragile. It begins by asserting calm almost as a sensory fact: To outer senses there is peace. But that phrase already hints at a gap between what can be perceived from the outside and what might be happening underneath. The repeated Deep silence feels less like a neutral description than a kind of insistence, as if the speaker has to say it twice to keep the scene steady.

Silence thickened into a shadow-country

Wilde makes the quiet tactile by placing it in a place that is half-real, half-dream: a shadowy land where even the boundary of darkness is mapped—where the shadows cease. That line suggests a horizon or limit, but also implies that the silence stretches right up to the edge of visibility. The tone here is languid and narcotic, the kind of calm that can feel like safety or like spellbound suspension. You could almost believe nothing moves.

The cry that punctures the dream

The poem’s first contradiction arrives in a single exception: Save for a cry that echoes shrill. The word Save is doing heavy work—it frames disturbance as a minor footnote, but the sound described is sharp enough to change the atmosphere. The bird is not simply singing; it is disconsolate, and the loneliness is emphasized by some lone bird. Even when the corncrake calls to its mate, the world does not soften into harmony; the answer comes not warmly but from a distance, the misty hill, as if companionship is possible only as a faint reply through fog.

The hinge: the moon’s sudden retreat

After this thin thread of sound, the poem turns hard on the word suddenly. The moon is personified, not as a steady guardian but as a figure capable of withdrawal and hiding. She withdraws her sickle from lightening skies, an image that makes moonlight feel like a blade being drawn back from a brightening surface. The calm that opened the poem is revealed as conditional: it depends on a fragile illumination that can be removed without warning.

Yellow gauze, sickness, and the urge to hide

The final image complicates the beauty with something unwell. The moon’s sickle shape carries an undertone of illness, reinforced by the sense that she retreats into a sombre cavern—not a palace but a hiding place. Even the veil that wraps her is not white or silver but yellow gauze, a color that can suggest age, fever, or dimmed light. The poem ends, then, with peace not as triumph but as evasion: quiet becomes what’s left when a wounded light covers itself and flees.

A sharper question inside the hush

If outer senses register peace while a disconsolate cry echoes and the moon bolts for a cavern, what kind of peace is this—comfort, or numbness? The poem seems to ask whether the night’s beauty is a veil in the same way the moon’s yellow gauze is: something that softens outlines, but also hides what the scene cannot bear to show directly.