If Your Eyes Were Not the Color of the Moon
If Your Eyes Were Not the Color of the Moon - meaning Summary
Love as Total Perception
This is a love poem in which the speaker attributes the world’s life and cohesion to the beloved. Through a sequence of natural and domestic images—moon, clay, bread, autumn—the poem presents the beloved’s eyes as the locus where everything becomes meaningful. Loving her is described as perceiving and holding the whole world; her presence animates time, matter, and perception so the speaker can feel alive and complete.
Read Complete AnalysesIf your eyes were not the color of the moon, of a day full [here, interrupted by the baby waking - continued about 26 hours later ] of a day full of clay, and work, and fire, if even held-in you did not move in agile grace like the air, if you were not an amber week, not the yellow moment when autumn climbs up through the vines; if you were not that bread the fragrant moon kneads, sprinkling its flour across the sky, oh, my dearest, I could not love you so! But when I hold you I hold everything that is - sand, time, the tree of the rain, everything is alive so that I can be alive: without moving I can see it all: in your life I see everything that lives.
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