The speaker remembers a woman who seemed unlike ordinary beauties — not roses or lilies, but something rarer and stranger. He compares her to the April moon: lovely more for its shade than its light, silvering lonely hills as night falls. That comparison gives the poem a hushed, delicate mood. She came close to him quietly and clearly, the way moonlight enters a landscape. Now that she is gone, the tone shifts from tender memory into plain grief. The final lines—“O dark, and dark, / The solitude—the fear”—turn the earlier beauty into loss. The moon becomes a figure for something lovely, brief, and unreachable, leaving the speaker alone with darkness and dread.
April Moon — Summary
Roses are sweet to smell and see, And lilies on the stem; But rarer, stranger buds there be, And she was like to them.
The little moon that April brings, More lovely shade than light, That, setting, silvers lonely hills Upon the verge of night--
Close to the world of my poor heart So stole she, still and clear; Now that she's gone, O dark, and dark, The solitude--the fear.