阅读理解

Passage 4

Once they‟ve discovered that “moon” rhymes with “June,” poets throughout the ages have seemingly forgotten everything else about our neighboring heavenly body and proceeded to write countless lines about the moon—without checking the facts.

Witness these lovely lines from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” first published in 1798, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

From the sails the dew did drip—
Till clomb above the eastern bar
The homed Moon, with one bright star
Within the nether tip

From a literary standpoint, these lines are a compact gem of descriptive writing, from the clever alliteration of “the dew did drip” to the vivid picture of the rising moon; astronomically, with all due respect to their author, they are nothing less than a monstrosity.

After the shooting of the albatross, the ship has traveled southward and is now in tropical waters, as intimated by the short duration of twilight described in the lines:

The Sun‟s rim dips; the stars rush out:
At one stride comes the dark.

Now, in the tropics, the crescent of the moon appears horizontal; therefore, there are left and right tips, but certainly no “nether” one. Worst of all is the idea of the star within the crescent, a crescent is all one sees of the moon, because it is the only part illuminated by the sun, but the remainder of the moon is always present, although invisible, therefore, no star could be observed inside the crescent, as the dark portion of the moon hides that segment of the sky. This is only one example of a classic error so common that it may be found even on the Turkish flag!

There is possibly another error in the poem: the context is a little vague in this respect, but so much happens in the narrative after the moon has ascended that one would assume it rose during the first half of the night—If this was the case, the moon could not possibly have been “horned” at all; it had to be full or at least approximately so. At this point,let‟s give the author the benefit of the doubt and merely pretend that the “dew did drip” for at least six hours after sunset—or could it?

Several years later, the Reverend Charles Wolfe, a contemporary of Coleridge, also was responsible for a mistake involving the moon, although this one is not obvious from the context in “The Burial of Sir Mm Moore at Corunna,” he writes:

We buried him darkly at dead of night
By the struggling moonbeam‟s misty light.

The British armies were defeated at Corunna, Spain, on January 16, 1809; Sir John Moore was killed while covering the retreat of the British to their skips, and was buried in the ramparts of the city before sunrise on January 17. No wonder the moonbeam was struggling: it was coming from the far side of the moon, and in a curved path, too. A new moon had occurred near midnight on the night before the battle; the moon was less than two days old at the time of the burial, and the slender crescent would have been practically impossible to see because of its proximity to the sun and, in any case, would have arisen about one hour after sunrise.

In May 1841 The Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine of Philadelphia published a story entitled “A descent into the Maelstrom,” by Edgar Allan Poe; it was soon to become one of his best-known stories, often quoted in anthologies, and unquestionably a masterpiece of suspense by a master of that art. The story, of course, is purely fictional. The gripping narrative describing the descent into the abyss willfully contradicts the law of gravity, a fact with which we do not intend to quarrel; however, in order to lend it an aura of authenticity, Poe sprinkles the narrative with, detailed references to the date and place of the event, and—woe betide him—to the position of the moon. Unfortunately, Mr. P. neglected to check his facts, and here the fun began.

The date was July 10, the place was “close to the Norwegian coast—in the sixty-eighth degree of latitude ...” As the ship approached the Maelstrom, the skipper looked up and saw the full moon “with the greatest distinctness”, a little later he consulted his watch “by the moon-light”; as he eventually made it to port, “the full moon was setting radiantly in the west.”

The incontrovertible fact is that on July 10 the sun will not set at all at latitude sixty-eight north; there is no night, or even twilight, and certainly no need of moonlight by which to read one‟s watch. Furthermore, at that latitude an object seen nearly overhead will never set, radiantly or otherwise; it will never even approach the horizon. Finally, a full moon in the middle of July would be somewhere between nineteen and twenty-six degrees south of the celestial equator, so that it would barely rise above the horizon at latitude sixty-eight north, and in some years it would not rise at all.

As the story ends, the skipper is picked up by some fishermen, and says, I told them my story—they did not believe it. Now I tell it to you, and I can scarcely expect you to put more faith in it than did the merry fishermen of Lofoden.” That old moon gave him away, that is why.

The following paragraphs are intended as a brief primer for poets everywhere who have discovered the “moon-June” rhyme and never bothered thereafter to check their facts or look further into any of the moon‟s other peculiarities.

The moon at first quarter reaches the meridian at approximately 6 p.m. local standard time, and sets around midnight. The full moon reaches its meridian at about midnight; it rises in the east approximately at sunset and sets in the west approximately at sunrise. The moon at last quarter rises around midnight arid reaches the meridian about 6 a. m.. The new moon, which one cannot see, is on the meridian at noon, rising and setting with the sun.

All this is derived from the fact that the new moon lies in the direction of the sun, while the full moon is in the part of the sky directly opposite form the sun. The moon at first quarter is ninety degrees (or “one quarter of the sky”) to the east of the sun, and the moon at last quarter is ninety degrees to the west of the sun; for that reason, a crescent moon can never be seen rising or setting with the sun. If the moon rises alter sunset but before midnight, its phase is somewhere between full and last quarter, and it will appear round or nearly round; conversely, if the moon rises after midnight but before sunrise, its phase is between last quarter and new, and it will be crescent-shaped. If, at North American latitudes, one sees a crescent moon in the first half of the night, it is a waxing moon and has to be in the western sky, because it will set before midnight, similarly, a crescent moon seen in the last half of the night is a waning moon and has to be in the eastern sky, because it will not reach the meridian until after sunrise.

The terms noon and midnight as used here must be taken somewhat loosely, because the standard or zone time by which we live may differ by as much as half an hour from the true local time, and also because, in general, the exact phase will not occur precisely when the moon is on the local meridian.

In describing the appearance of the moon, one must remember also that it receives its light from the sun; therefore the illuminated side of the moon‟s surface is invariably nearer the sun, Similarly, the cusps (or tips, as Coleridge describes them) always point away from the sun, and the line joining the cusps is perpendicular to the line joining the centers of the sun and moon. Consequently, in the tropics, where the sun rises and sets almost vertically, the crescent moon appears nearly horizontal.

So, poets and writers, take heed when singing your praises of and setting your stories to scenes illuminated by the moon above; be sure the moon you describe has, at least, the right to be there.