Queen of the silver bow

"Queen of the silver bow! by thy pale beam,
  Alone and pensive, I delight to stray,
And watch thy shadow trembling in the stream,
  Or mark the floating clouds that cross thy way;
And while I gaze, thy mild and placid light
  Sheds a soft calm upon my troubled breast:
And oft I think-fair planet of the night--
  That in thy orb the wretched may have rest;
The sufferers of the earth perhaps may go--
  Released by death-to thy benignant sphere;
And the sad children of despair and woe
  Forget in thee their cup of sorrow here.
Oh that I soon may reach thy world serene,
  Poor wearied pilgrim in this toiling scene!"
                                          

 ~Charlotte Smith.

At a Lunar eclipse

At a Lunar eclipse

Thy shadow, Earth, from Pole to Central Sea,
Now steals along upon the Moon's meek shine
In even monochrome and curving line
Of imperturbable serenity.

How shall I link such sun-cast symmetry
With the torn troubled form I know as thine,
That profile, placid as a brow divine,
With continents of moil and misery?

And can immense Mortality but throw
So small a shade, and Heaven's high human scheme
Be hemmed within the coasts yon arc implies?

Is such the stellar gauge of earthly show,
Nation at war with nation, brains that teem,
Heroes, and women fairer than the skies?

By Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

Aristotle

...and the evidence of our eyes shows us that the moon is spherical

For how else should the moon as it waxes and wanes

show for the most part a crescent-shaped or gibbous figure,

and only at one moment a half-moon?

 - Aristotle, "On the Heavens."