Frank Marshall Davis answers a deceptively simple question by refusing to give a single answer. Even the phrase “new full moon” is a small paradox: a new moon is dark and invisible, while a full moon is bright and complete, so the title hints that language and perception will be part of the mystery. The poem turns the moon into a blank screen, and each observer projects a version of the world onto it. The prisoner sees “a round white door rendered useless by stout steel bars,” so the moon becomes freedom made visible but unreachable. Frogs see “a luminous toadstool sprouting from the black floor of a pond,” an earthy image that treats the sky as a pond turned upside down. The thief and the murderer see the moon as “a busy stoolpigeon,” an informer whose light threatens to expose what darkness might hide. From the opening lines, then, meaning is not fixed inside the object; it is shaped by the fears and desires of whoever looks.
The poem is free verse, with no regular meter or rhyme scheme, and it uses the repeated phrase “a new full moon is” as a loose refrain. Each line adds another possible definition without resolving the question. The syntax grows more expansive as the poem moves from brief comparisons to the young lover’s sentence, which unspools through ellipses: “a priceless pearl he would tear from the sky . . . set in a ring woven from sparkling stars . . . place on the finger of his sweetheart's hand.” Those pauses slow the line and suggest longing taking its time. The moon becomes not just a pearl but a gift, something to pull down and transform into intimacy. It is an image of wanting, not of observing.
The poet’s answer is the most elaborate and the most self-aware. The moon becomes “a beautiful woman . . . ageless . . . deathless . . . inaccessible . . . and infinitely mysteriously sad . . . who gazes in my window through a dark veil set with shimmering stars.” The ellipses create a hushed, incantatory rhythm, as if the speaker is composing the metaphor while speaking. The adjectives pile up and pull against one another: she is deathless yet sad, beautiful yet inaccessible. That inaccessibility matters. Unlike the lover, who wants to tear the moon down and give it away, the poet keeps the moon at a distance, admiring the very thing he cannot possess. His moon is feminine, romantic, and melancholic, a version of beauty refined into loneliness.
But Davis does not let that vision have the last word. The scientist’s answer closes the poem with a different kind of language: “a periodical phenomenon occurring when the lifeless half of our planetary satellite revolves to such a position that solar rays are reflected from the whole of its atmosphereless surface to our own stellar body.” Words such as “lifeless,” “atmosphereless,” and “periodical” drain the moon of story and mood. The scientist describes a process, not a presence. The contrast is not necessarily an attack on science; rather, it shows what scientific explanation deliberately leaves out—the prisoner’s longing, the lover’s gift, the poet’s veiled woman. Each definition has its own vocabulary and its own truth.
The poem’s significance lies in its refusal to crown any single definition as final. It is not simply saying that people see things differently; it is showing how a definition reveals the definer. The prisoner, the thief, the lover, the poet, and the scientist all speak of the same object, yet each creates a different moon. By ending with the scientist’s flat, technical sentence, Davis leaves the question of the title open. A new full moon is all of these things and none of them entirely, because the moon in the poem is less a fact than a mirror.