A lullaby sung by someone who is about to leave: that is the situation of Dowson's "The Moon Maiden's Song." The speaker stands over a sleeping mortal and tells Sleep to hang its "canopy" over his brain, as if drawing the curtains round a bed. Her purpose is odd and a little sad. She wants him to forget her. "Dim grow his memory, / When he wake again." Love, she says, "stays a summer night," then flies back "to her starry home" when morning arrives.
The central idea is that love of this kind is a visitation. It belongs to the dark and cannot survive daylight or ordinary waking memory. The poem is not simple resignation, though. In the third stanza the Maiden insists, "Yet thy days are mine; / Love's seal is over thee." A seal closes a letter or marks something as owned, so the image suggests a mark that stays after the memory has gone. Her next lines pile up concessions: her ways are "far" from his, and his memory is "dim." Neither admission cancels the claim. The tone is tender, but it is also possessive, even slightly eerie. One could read her as merciful, sparing him the ache of remembering, or as casting a spell on a man who never gets to answer. The sleeper never speaks, and the poem leaves that ambiguity open.
Small shifts in language carry much of the meaning. In the first stanza the sleeper is "his" and "this sleeper's," described in the third person as though the Maiden were instructing Sleep alone. By the third stanza he has become "thy" and "thee," and she speaks to him directly. The closer she comes to leaving, the more intimate her address. The repeated word "dim" changes role as well. "Dim grow his memory" is a wish or command. "Dim though thy memory" is a concession, something she now accepts as the price of the whole arrangement. Notice too that she calls herself Love in the refrain, speaking of "her winged flight." Maiden and emotion blur into one figure, bird-like and unreachable.
The form suits this hushed, charmlike speech. There are four quatrains of short lines, mostly five or six syllables, rhymed abab. "Brain" and "again" rhyme cleanly (the second depends on pronouncing "again" to rhyme with "brain"). "Canopy" and "memory" rhyme only on their soft, unstressed endings, so the lines seem to drift off into sleep. The refrain, by contrast, is steadier: "Love stays a summer night" falls into a regular iambic beat. "Night" and "flight" rhyme firmly, but "come" and "home" do not quite match in sound, though they look alike on the page. That slight mismatch may be deliberate, since the refrain ends on the place she is returning to, and the sound doesn't fully settle there. This is an inference from the sounds, not something the poem states.
The refrain appears twice, word for word, so half the poem is repetition. This gives the poem the feel of a song, as the title promises, and it hints at a ritual that might happen again on other nights. Yet the repeated lines do not mean the same thing each time. After the first stanza they read as a general truth about love. After "Love's seal is over thee" they sound more like a promise, or a warning, that she will go but her hold will remain.
Imagery keeps the cosmic and the domestic side by side. The "starry home" and "lights of morning" belong to the sky, while the canopy and the sleeper's brain belong to a bedroom. A "summer night," the shortest kind, makes love's stay brief by definition. The poem's lasting interest lies in how much it fits into sixteen lines. It takes a fairy-tale premise, a moon-woman who loves a sleeping man and leaves at dawn, and turns it into a question about what love leaves behind when memory fails. Its answer is only half comforting: something may be left, but the person it marks may never know it is there.