This Lunar Beauty - Analysis

A beauty that refuses biography

The poem’s central claim is that a certain kind of beauty—this lunar beauty—is most itself when it has no story attached to it. Auden opens with a startling purity: it Has no history, is complete and early. The word early matters: this beauty isn’t “immature,” it’s unspoiled by consequence. The poem then draws a sharp line between that condition and the familiar, human kind of beauty that comes “later.” If beauty later Bear any feature, the speaker says, it’s because It had a lover—meaning it has been touched by particular life, by intimacy, by narrative. Later beauty is another: still beauty, but altered, personalized, marked.

The dream that keeps a different clock

The next movement explains how this historyless beauty operates: This like a dream / Keeps other time. The comparison to a dream isn’t decorative; it’s a claim about time itself. Dreams don’t measure time in sequence and consequence; they feel whole at once. By contrast, daytime is called The loss of this. Waking life pulls us back into measurable duration—time is inches—a blunt, almost humiliating phrase that turns time into a ruler held up to the body and the day. The poem implies a tension here: we want the completeness of dreamtime, but we live in daytime’s accounting.

Ghosts, desire, and the heart’s damage

Once time becomes measurable, the heart becomes vulnerable to revision and regret: the heart’s changes arrive, and with them the “ghost” that has haunted, Lost and wanted. These three words sketch a whole psychology: haunting suggests something that won’t stay in the past, “lost” suggests absence, and “wanted” suggests continuing desire. The contradiction is that longing keeps something present precisely by admitting it’s gone. In this middle section, love looks like the engine of history—attachments that create “features” in beauty, and wounds that create ghosts.

The poem’s turn: this beauty is not a haunting

Then comes the hinge: But this was never. The speaker suddenly protects the lunar beauty from the whole ghost-story the poem has just evoked. This beauty was never A ghost’s endeavor, never a project of desire trying to resurrect what time took. Even the line Nor finished this suggests that human wanting can “finish” things—close them, define them, exhaust them—but lunar beauty stays unfinished in a different way: not incomplete, but not used up by interpretation. The poem even imagines the ghost itself being calm: Was ghost at ease. In the presence of this beauty, the usual restlessness of memory goes quiet.

Love and sorrow kept at a distance

The ending makes an almost severe promise: Love shall not near / The sweetness here, and Nor sorrow take / His endless look. That final phrase—endless look—casts lunar beauty as pure perception, a gaze that doesn’t grab or grieve. Love and sorrow are not condemned; they are simply too possessive, too historical, too tied to the “inches” of time. The poem’s tension sharpens here: the very forces that give human life its depth—love’s closeness, sorrow’s claim—are portrayed as threats to a sweetness that depends on distance and impersonality.

A hard question the poem leaves behind

If beauty becomes another once it had a lover, what does that imply about intimacy? The poem seems to suggest that love, by making something specific and lived-in, also makes it mortal—subject to ghosts, features, and aftereffects. The “lunar” alternative is exquisite, but it may also be lonely: an endless look that stays untouched because it never lets anything near.