The Moon: A random History (Part 2)

The Moon as Guardianess
Our pockmarked satellite is not always viewed as a fickle woman, waxing and waning, one side always hidden from us. Sometimes it's a different kind of female altogether.

Artemis, one of the Greek goddesses I mentioned in my last post, daughter of Zeus and Leto, and twin sister to Apollo, was revered as goddess of the hunt and protector of children, especially young girls. She was also ferociously independent, guarding her chastity with arrows.  And vengeful. She turned the hunter Aktaion into a stag so his own pack of dogs would run him down and devour him. There are several versions as to why she did this. One has her enraged that Aktaion bragged he was a better hunter than Artemis. In another, Aktaion is punished for accidentally seeing Artemis in the nude as she bathed with her nymphs.

Statues of Artemis show her with her bow and quiver of arrows, usually accompanied by a small stag. Sometimes she is dressed in animal skins. 

The narrator of Jane Cooper’s poem “Hunger Moon,” is woken by the moon’s “cocked gun of silence” as moonlight steals across her pillow.

Cooper was an American poet of the generation that came of age during WWII. She wrote "of the constraints placed on both her individuality and her art during the repressive decade that followed the boys' return from war and women's return to the kitchens of America." 

In "Hunger Moon," a “vain woman” who once slept in that room is guarded by a crouching moon dressed “in pale buckskins.”  Time folds in on itself in this poem. Is the time then or now? Is the vain woman still there, trapped? Is she a younger version of the narrator? Does she need to be freed for spring to finally come? Does the moonbeam that “stealthily changes position” echo in the turning and turning that needs to take place for spring to come and the woman to be freed? Have a look for yourself.

And another poem by Cooper, "The Builder of Houses" speaks more directly of the wild feminine. No moon symbolism in this one but Artemis' protective powers would have helped the young girl trying to build her own private space in the woods, only to have it destroyed by "rude cousins" who come "stealing with boys' laughter." She eventually hunts down another spot only to have it taken over as duck blind by her stepfather. Where are Artemis' arrows when you need them?

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This string of moon allusions has been like a string of beads that keeps scattering apart on me, so I will leave the Man in the Moon and the rocky Moon itself for part 3.

I'm also leaving this blog short to encourage you to read the poems referenced here. They really are the best part.