LOOK DOWN FAIR MOON

It’s another full moon tonight, so here is the second installment of my little Moon Song project for 2021. This month, I was drawn to Ned Rorem’s setting of Walt Whitman’s poem, Look Down, Fair Moon.

The month of March marks a year of Covid lockdown in the US, and as we pass this tragic marker, I can’t help but think of the hundreds of thousands of souls needlessly lost to this pandemic. The past year has also seen an upsetting continuation of the United States’ long, fraught, and dark history of racism and xenophobia, from the horrific murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery to the brutal mass murder of Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, Hyun Jung Grant, Soon Chung Park, Suncha Kim, and Yong Ae Yue in Atlanta recently. Add to that the seditious invasion of the Capitol at the beginning of the year, and it feels increasingly like the nation is violently ripping itself apart at the seams these days.

I wonder if this is how things felt to Whitman as the Civil War raged on when he penned this poem. One of the things I find most striking about this short poem is that the reader never knows which side these dead soldiers were fighting for. Whitman seems keenly aware that at this point, it doesn’t really matter. Those details have become meaningless in death.

Thanks to my friend Robert Mollicone for joining me on this leg of our journey through the full moons of 2021.

TEXT:

Look down, fair moon, and bathe this scene;

Pour softly down night's nimbus floods, on faces ghastly, swollen, purple;

On the dead, on their backs, with their arms toss'd wide,

Pour down your unstinted nimbus, sacred moon.

– Walt Whitman

NED ROREM: Look Down, Fair Moon with Robert Mollicone, piano