The Moon Of Other Days - Analysis

The Moon as a False Passport Home

The poem’s central claim is that memory can make a perfect, almost holy picture of Home, but the present refuses to cooperate: the same moon that once seemed to bless London nights now hangs over a place that feels contaminated and alien. Kipling lets the moon promise continuity—can that be The Moon of Other Days?—and then uses the rest of the poem to show how cruel that promise is. The moon becomes a kind of counterfeit passport: it looks like the old world, but it cannot carry the speaker back into it.

Veranda Dusk and the First Taste of Loss

The opening fixes us in an evening scene that is already an ending: beneath the deep veranda’s shade, with bats begin to fly, he watches Another evening die. The tone is elegiac but not calm; the small outcry alas! signals a mind that can’t simply observe. Even the moon’s entrance is unsettling: she rises Blood-red through haze. The speaker reaches for classical comfort—Sainted Diana!—as if naming the goddess might cleanse what he sees. But the question immediately undermines the comfort: if this is Diana, why does she look like an omen?

Kitty Smith and the Sanctified London Walk

The poem’s nostalgia sharpens into a private invocation: shade of little Kitty Smith, called both Sweet Saint and tied to Kensington. Whether she is dead, absent, or simply unreachable, she is treated like a patron saint of the speaker’s lost life. The remembered London is softened into haze and intimacy: arm in arm in Putney’s evening haze, with the extravagant claim that Hammersmith was Heaven. That word Heaven matters because it turns ordinary suburbs into a moral landscape: the past isn’t just pleasant, it’s blessed. Against that glow, the present moon can only feel like an impostor wearing familiar light.

The Turn: Wandle Becomes Sutlej

The poem’s hinge comes with blunt geographic replacement: Wandle’s stream is Sutlej now. A small London river is swapped for a major Indian one, and the swap is not neutral—it’s an injury to perception. The same Putney’s evening haze becomes The dust raised by half a hundered kine, as if the poem is rewriting its own soft-focus memory into grit that scrapes the eyes. The city itself is described as Unkempt, unclean and seething, looming through mist. Even plant-life participates in the displacement: Putney’s golden gorse is replaced by The sickly babul. The remembered Home is gold and heath-like; the present is sickly, thorny, and foreign to the speaker’s sense of belonging.

Hecate’s Dirty Benediction

In the final stanza, the speaker’s address shifts from Diana to old Hecate, trading a chaste moon-goddess for a darker figure. The tone flips into bitter command: Glare down, make the pie-dog yell, draw up typhoid-term from the drain, and pull each bazaar into a single, stinking atmosphere. The catalogue of contamination—fever, tank, drains, smells—reads like an attempt to make the night confess its reality. And yet the stanza ends with a twist of sick humor and longing: Thank Heaven the moon still shows a smiling face to little Kitty Smith! The contradiction is sharp: the speaker despises the present landscape, but he clings to the idea that the moon can still “smile” on the person who embodies his lost peace.

The Poem’s Hardest Question

If the moon can still look kindly on Kitty—if it can still be the same moon—then what exactly has become unlivable: the place, or the speaker’s own capacity to feel at home? The poem keeps insisting on filth and sickness outside the window, but it also admits, in its frantic naming of Diana and Hecate, that the mind is supplying the gods. The moon’s face may be the same; it’s the meaning of that face that has turned.