A few nights ago the moon was a sliver; now she is full. Dickinson turns that ordinary change in the sky into a little drama of unveiling. The "Chin of Gold" becomes a "perfect Face" turned "Upon the World below," and the rest of the poem is a portrait of this newly revealed woman. Its central idea is that beauty on such a scale is dazzling and out of reach. The speaker can only admire her, wish for her favour, and finally shrink the whole universe to the size of a lady's wardrobe.
The portrait is built from precious materials. The forehead is "Amplest Blonde," the cheek "a Beryl hewn," the lips "Amber," the will "Silver." "Hewn" is a stonemason's word, so the moon seems less a woman than a statue or a jewel-casket. Yet these are also the colours the moon really wears. The one exception is the eye, "unto the Summer Dew / The likest I have known." After all the hard glitter, dew is small, wet and alive. The phrase "the likest I have known" is also modest. The speaker is reaching for the closest comparison she has, and she admits it may not be enough.
The third stanza turns on silence. "Her Lips of Amber never part": the moon is fixed in mineral stillness and never speaks. The speaker can only wonder about "the smile / Upon Her Friend she could confer / Were such Her Silver Will." The grammar here is conditional, full of "could" and "Were," and that suits the idea. The moon's kindness is imaginable but not promised, and she behaves like a queen who grants or withholds. The next stanza follows from this. To be "the remotest Star" would be a privilege because the moon's path runs "Beside Your Palace Door." The poem never says who "Your" is, and that blank draws the reader into the scene. Even the faintest star, it suggests, shares in the grandeur of passing close to her.
Then comes the sharpest move. In the last stanza the moon's "Bonnet is the Firmament," the "Universe" is her "Shoe," the stars are "Trinkets at Her Belt," and her "Dimities" are "of Blue." Dimity is a light, everyday cotton, and bonnets, shoes and belts are small domestic things. Dickinson sets them against the largest words she can find, "Firmament" and "Universe," and the result is both comic and awe-struck. It is as if a child, or a courtier, were dressing the heavens like a doll while still bowing to them. The sky is just the blue cloth she happens to wear.
The form carries this mixture of reverence and play. The poem is in common metre, lines of eight and six syllables alternating, the rhythm of the hymn-book. A hymn is addressed to something that cannot answer, which is just the moon's position here. The rhymes are loose. "Ago" and "below" chime fully, but "hewn/known," "smile/Will" and "Star/Door" only half-rhyme. The final "Shoe/Blue" closes with a full, clean click. Perhaps the middle stanzas, which dwell on silence and the hope of favour, wobble as the speaker's confidence does, and the finish returns to certainty. The dashes work like held breaths, and the capitals on "Her," "Face," "Certainty" and "Silver Will" make the nouns look like titles at a royal court, so that the moon seems less an object than a sovereign.
The poem is worth reading for the way it handles scale. Few poems about the moon tell us it wears a bonnet, and fewer make that feel respectful rather than silly. By making the infinite domestic, Dickinson makes it more intimate without making it less large. The moon stays distant, silent and golden, but the speaker's playful, slightly envious eye brings her close enough to be described down to her shoes.