Walter de la Mare’s “Moonlight” opens with a strange claim: the far moon maketh lovers wise. The archaic verb makes the statement sound like a proverb, old and faintly riddling. But the wisdom here is not practical or moral. It is a wisdom of perception. Moonlight does not merely show the loved face; it transforms it. The speaker says the moon is “lending curved cheeks, dark lips, dark eyes / A strangeness not their own.” The beloved becomes briefly unfamiliar, as if the face belongs partly to the moonlight and partly to the person. That notion of lending matters: the strangeness is not a permanent possession, only a gift of this moment.
The poem is built in two quatrains, following an abab shape softened by half-rhyme, so that the pattern feels close to dream. “Wise” and “eyes” chime exactly; “down” and “own” only half-rhyme, pulling against the expected sound. The first three lines of each stanza carry four stresses, and the final line drops to three. That contraction is audible: the poem opens a space and then narrows it, as moonlight does when it crosses a room and settles in a single silver band. The movement from “trembling down” to “not their own” is a descent from the far sky into the face, from distance into intimate nearness—yet the face is not quite possessed.
De la Mare’s imagery keeps the scene at the edge of darkness. The moon is far, pale, and trembling; the lovers’ faces are reduced to “curved cheeks, dark lips, dark eyes,” a list of shadows and shapes rather than a full portrait. The repetition of “dark” deepens the contrast with pale light. Then the lovers close their eyes to kiss. The phrase “starless darkness” suggests a deliberate shutting-out: they want a private blackness, a peace beyond the reach of the moon. Closing the lids is an attempt to enter a world that belongs only to them. Yet the final two lines quietly undo that hope. “Even on that secret world from this / Her twilight enters in.” The private interior is not sealed. The moon’s dim, threshold light crosses the boundary between outside and inside, between the visible world and the closed-eye world of touch and thought.
That final couplet is the poem’s sharpest turn. “Twilight” is a word for betweenness, neither day nor night, and “enters in” doubles the idea of entry, as though the light will not be kept out. The lovers seek peace in darkness, but what reaches them is not harsh daylight; it is the moon’s soft otherness. The poem suggests that love cannot be made purely private or purely known. The beloved, touched in the dark, carries a strangeness that comes from beyond both lovers. This is perhaps why the moon “maketh lovers wise”: it teaches them that intimacy includes distance, and that even the most familiar face holds something not their own.
The lyric’s significance lies in that restraint. Instead of describing passion, it describes a small altered perception. Moonlight makes the known world strange for a moment, and the poem quietly insists that this strangeness is not a threat to love but part of its depth. The far moon enters the secret world; the beloved is loved as someone partly mysterious.