A Shropshire Lad, Poem XXXVI

The poem uses the symbol of the moon ironically. The poem, or more specifically the narrator’s first steps on what is presumably a long journey, is floodlighted by the hard white glare of a full moon. At one level, “Poem XXXVI” is a love poem. Within that genre, the moon is often used to suggest the tonic mystery of intimacy, the evocative closeness of powerful emotion, and the warm glow of romance. Here, however, the full moon creates distance not intimacy. The moon does not sustain mystery, but rather makes clarity unavoidable. The white light serves to heighten the narrator’s sense of foreboding by casting in harsh relief the long road that stretches ahead of him. Here the moon symbolizes the cool hard reality that the narrator so desperately (and understandably) wishes to minimize. I will soon return, he struggles to assure himself. The moonlight, however, exacerbates the narrator’s anxiety, worsens his sense of alienation. Given the klieg light overhead, there is no way to ignore the road ahead, no way to minimize the distance he must travel, the miles he must trudge, to borrow his verb, which he repeats. “White in the moon the long road lies” (Lines 1, 3, 15)—the line is repeated twice in the opening stanza and then again in the closing stanza, reminding the narrator of the chilling implications of his departure.