A question about astronomy becomes a theory of desire in just eight lines. Someone asks which is better, the full Moon or the Crescent, and the Moon, the very thing being judged, refuses to choose. "Neither," it says, and then makes its real claim: "That is best which is not." The best thing is whatever hasn't happened yet. The moment you "Achieve it," you "efface the Sheen," rubbing out the glow that made it worth wanting.
The moon is a clever choice for this argument. A crescent is a promise, a bright edge with the dark part waiting to be filled in. A full moon looks like completion. Dickinson's Moon, though, won't treat completion as a prize. "Efface" is the verb for wearing away an inscription, and "Sheen" is surface shine rather than substance. Judging by these words, what we love in a thing may be its shimmer of possibility, which survives only while we haven't grasped it.
The second stanza leaves the sky behind and becomes harder, more abstract. "Fruition" normally suggests a ripe harvest you can gather and keep, but the poem says "Not of detention is Fruition." Detention means holding, even imprisoning, and fruition cannot be held that way. Then comes the jolt of "Shudder to attain." We expect *strive* or *hope* and get a shiver of dread. The sound carries the feeling, too, since "Shudder" quietly echoes "Sheen" from the first stanza. The same hush of *sh* links the glow that gets erased to the fear of erasing it.
"Transport's decomposition follows" is the poem's most compressed line. "Transport" can mean rapture, being carried out of yourself, and "decomposition" means rot, the breaking-down of something once alive. Ecstasy, the line says, doesn't last; it falls apart. The final line, "He is Prism born," is left unexplained, and the "He" has no clear antecedent. It might be anyone who attains something. A prism splits white light into separate colours, which is a kind of decomposition, so the last line quietly gives the previous one a second meaning. One reading is that a person is made to break the single glare of fulfilment into fragments. Whether that is a loss or a gift stays open, because a spectrum is also beautiful.
The form fits the argument. There are two quatrains, but the lines are uneven, and long lines alternate with short, curt ones. The first line is a full, polite question, and the reply, "Neither — said the Moon —", is clipped by its dashes, as if the Moon were unimpressed. Rhyme is loosened rather than abandoned. The even lines all end on an *n* sound (Moon, Sheen, attain, born), with "Moon" and "Sheen" a near-rhyme and the second pair a looser echo. The poem seems to promise a neat chime and then never quite delivers it, much as it says fulfilment behaves.
Dickinson's habits of punctuation and capitalisation matter here. The capitals on Moon, Crescent, Sheen, Fruition, Transport and Prism turn them into figures almost like characters in a small allegory. The vocabulary shifts as well, from soft, visual words (Moon, Crescent, Sheen) to hard, Latinate ones (detention, fruition, decomposition) that sound like the language of law and science. The poem moves from image to abstraction, and the Moon gradually vanishes and a Prism takes its place. The poem decomposes its own opening picture.
Emily Dickinson, who lived in Amherst, Massachusetts, wrote nearly 1,800 poems, and only a small number appeared in print during her life. Her reputation rests on exactly this kind of compression. Here she takes a familiar idea, that longing is sweeter than possession, and makes it stranger and more unsettling. The Moon does not console us. It suggests that getting what we want may be the moment we lose it, and it leaves us with the faint, odd comfort of a prism's colours.