Arna Bontemps, a poet, novelist, and librarian associated with the Harlem Renaissance, published “Length of Moon” in his 1963 collection *Personals*. By then Bontemps was in his sixties and had spent decades preserving African American literary history at Fisk University; these later poems often trade the public voice of the 1920s for a quieter, more retrospective music. Though 1963 was a turbulent year in American life, “Length of Moon” turns inward, preferring meditation to public statement.
The poem moves in small, breath-like units: a tercet, a couplet, a tercet, a couplet, a tercet. The alternating line groups create a sense of dwindling — each couplet sounds like a brief echo after a longer statement. Rhymes arrive softly and openly: “moon” meets “dune,” “know” meets “go,” “stay” meets “say.” Even the opening half-rhyme of “hour” and “flower” feels like a fading rather than a chime. The meter hovers between iambic and free verse, giving the lines an unsettled, suspended quality, as if the speaker is listening closely to time passing.
The imagery balances precise natural detail with symbolic weight. The “golden hour” is both a literal time of evening and a metaphor for something precious and fleeting; it “tick[s] its last” like a clock, yet the next image turns mechanical time into organic descent — “the flame will go down in the flower.” That phrase compresses light, heat, and blossom into one dying gesture. Then the scale shifts upward to the “briefer length of moon” that marks “the sea-line and the yellow dune.” A moon that measures the landscape also measures time, and its length is already “briefer,” as if each cycle of illumination grows shorter than the one before. The painted coastline is beautiful but remote, already withdrawing from the speaker.
As the poem progresses, remembrance itself becomes uncertain. The third tercet says, “Then we may think of this, yet / There will be something forgotten / And something we should forget.” Memory is not simply lost; it is partly chosen. The phrase “something we should forget” introduces an emotional judgment: not all forgetting is failure. The fourth couplet widens this wisdom into a universal law: “The stone will fail; a rose is sure to go.” Hardness and softness, permanence and fragility, share the same fate. The semicolon balances the two clauses so calmly that destruction sounds less like tragedy than routine.
The final tercet returns to human relationship and domestic space. Standing “as long at the picket gate” suggests a couple lingering at the edge of home, perhaps at the end of an evening or a leave-taking. But the poem refuses drama: “there will be less to say.” That line is the emotional core. Time does not only shorten moonlight and flowers; it also shortens language. The quiet that follows is not empty but reconciled. In just thirteen lines, Bontemps turns the passing of time into a felt intimacy, locating large ideas — decline, memory, impermanence — in the small space between a gate and a darkening sky. That is what makes “Length of Moon” significant beyond its era: it shows a poet of the Harlem Renaissance writing with delicate lyricism about ordinary, universal loss while never losing the precision and dignity that mark his strongest work.