Anyone who has woken from a dream with its best part already dissolving will recognise the mood of E. H. Johnson's "A Swim in the Moonlight." Two short stanzas describe a night journey through an impossible landscape, and in both the speaker reaches for something beautiful and ends up holding nothing. The poem's central idea is the gap between wanting and having: the lovelier a thing appears, the less willing it is to be owned.
The opening line sets the logic of dreams in motion. "I swam across the skies last night" swaps the elements: the speaker swims where one would expect to fly, and the next line completes the reversal, since "stars floated on the sea." Sky and water have traded places, and the stars, normally fixed overhead, now bob on the waves like lanterns. This is the kind of image the poem does best. It works because it is half true: a calm sea really does hold the stars in its surface, so the fantasy grows out of something a child might actually have seen from a shore at night. The word "last night" also quietly frames the whole thing as a memory or dream, which explains why physics can be ignored.
Then comes the turn. "But when I tried to pluck a light, / The stars all eluded me." The verb "pluck" is a good choice: it treats the stars as fruit or flowers, small and ripe and easy to pick, which makes their escape feel almost like a tease. "Eluded" is a slightly formal word in a poem otherwise written in plain speech, and it does useful work. It suggests not merely failing to catch something but being outwitted by it, as though the stars were playing a game whose rules the speaker never learned.
The second stanza raises the stakes. Having failed with the small lights, the speaker goes for the biggest one, the moon, this time "riding a cloud which was passing by." The change of transport is telling. Swimming is effort; riding a passing cloud is drifting, almost passive, and the speaker seems to trust that the larger ambition will be easier. It is not. The moon "flew back to its place on high," a phrase that restores the order the first stanza had overturned. The sky and sea were scrambled for a moment, but the moon returns to where it belongs, and the dream's freedom ends.
The last line is the poem's quiet punch: "And the sea was but sea, too soon." The enchantment drains out of the water in a single beat. The word "but" does the diminishing, reducing the sea to something merely ordinary, and "too soon" lets a note of regret slip in. The speaker does not storm or complain; the loss is delivered almost lightly, which is what makes it land.
Structurally, the poem is tidy and compact. Each stanza has four lines, with a rhyme scheme of ABAB (night/sea/light/me in the first stanza, and a looser pairing of "moon" and "soon" with "by" and "high" in the second). The rhythm is a bouncy, song-like beat, close to a nursery rhyme or a lullaby, which suits a dream and gives the sadness a gentle cushioning. There is a pleasing mirror in the design, too: both stanzas move from reaching to failing, so the poem repeats its own disappointment, much as a dream might loop.
What makes it worth reading is how much it does with so little. It never explains what the stars and moon stand for, yet it is easy to hear them as any goal that looks close enough to touch, a wish, an ambition, a perfect moment. The poem leaves that reading to us, and its modest, musical surface lets the ache arrive almost unnoticed.