Shut Out That Moon, The Analysis

This poem was written in 1904. Hardy's wife is still alive, but the regret at their wasted years is not greatly dissimilar in tone from that of several of the poems he wrote after she had died. For example, in After a Journey Hardy spoke of his sadness at the fact that he and Emma had grown apart:

“Summer gave us sweets, but autumn wrought division.”
Whilst in this earlier poem he says,
“Too fragrant was Life's early bloom,Too tart the fruit it brought!”

The passing seasons of one year are seen as a metaphor for the span of an entire life - with the sweets and early bloom of the youthful spring and summertime of life contrasting sharply with the bitter tasting autumnal fruits of old age.

In this poem the poet desires to be locked away from the night-time outdoor sights, sounds and smells, because they unavoidably remind him of happier times which are now lost forever. After the strongly felt desire for escape we have a closely observed description of the thing the poet is anxious to escape from. The “stealing moon” (“stealing” in the sense that she steals across the sky, and, also, that she has stolen the past from him) reminds him too much of days,
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“Before our lutes were strewn
With years-deep dust, and names we read
On a white stone were hewn.”

Although the lute's music is metaphorical - being a reference to youthful playfulness and love and happy voices - it shows how the sense of hearing is evoked simply by a vision of the moon.

The second stanza is also involved with the heavens - but here the sense of sight had previously delighted to the clear night vision of the heavenly constellations.

The third stanza talks of the sense of smell - the sensations evoked by “midnight scents/That come forth lingeringly.” The sweetness of the scents had, in times past, been a symbol of the sweetness that existed between the poet and his love.

“When loving seemed a laugh, and love
All it was said to be.”

The final stanza deals entirely with the poet's desire for isolation - away from these natural phenomena, which arouse so many memories. He wishes to have a prison-like seclusion in which his eyes and thoughts will not be subjected to external influences, the kind that re-awake ancient associations. He craves “dingy details” crudely looming in his “common lamp-lit room,” and only the most functional of language, “Mechanic speech be wrought” - the hardness of the word “wrought” (meaning something made, usually for a practical purpose) indicates a desire for unadorned simplicity. The poem ends with the observation that the tree (of life) that bloomed so beautifully in spring (youth) was to deliver a sour fruit to him in his later, autumnal, years.

It would be wrong to read this poem too literally. Hardy does not really want to be locked away in hermit-like separation. Rather he is showing how the things in nature which return each year, or which are permanent, like the heavens, have associations for each one of us. Sometimes the happiness of which they were once a token becomes sadness. Then these natural things, because they are inescapable, instead of bringing back our happy memories, reinforce our misery. This is an example of what is meant by Hardy's “universality” - although he talks of a very private sadness, he tells of feelings that are common to all of us, for whom he speaks here.