A Wolf Moon and Lover's Laments

In which we look at the moon and some of its many associations in stories and poems

Hello and welcome to another edition of What’s the Story?

According to my 2024 calendar, tomorrow is the night of the ‘Wolf Moon’, a concept new to me. It is so named apparently because this is the time when wolves go on the prowl and howl for a mate. Contrary to folklore they are not howling at the moon. By coincidence, when I discovered this I was reading a first novel by Kathleen Murray, The Deadwood Encore (2022), in which the comic action builds towards a festival called Wolf Night. The novel is set in Murray’s native County Carlow and the (alas, fictional) festival is held to mark the killing of the last wolf in Ireland. This much is true: the last reliable sighting of a wolf here was in 1786 when a wolf was killed on Mount Leinster, in Carlow, for preying on sheep. Now there are calls to reintroduce the wolf, to help cull the deer population.

  As we know, the wolf generally gets a bad rap in folktale and myth, from Little Red Riding Hood to Steppenwolf, with the noble exception of the she-wolf who raised Romulus and Remus. Yet those of us who own dogs share our lives with a pampered scion of the beast. In his long poem ‘The Wasteland’ our old friend, T. S. Eliot, (see What’s the Story? 19 December and 29 August 2023) adapted a line of John Webster’s Revenge tragedy, The White Devil (1612) to mock this modern domestication of the wolf.

Weeping over the body of her slain son, Webster’s grieving Cornelia says:  

  Call unto his funeral dole

  The ant, the fieldmouse, and the mole,

  To rear him hillocks that shall keep him warm,

  And (when gay tombs are robb'd) sustain no harm;

  But keep the wolf far thence, that's foe to men,

  For with his nails he'll dig them up again.

(Act V, scene iv)

Eliot’s version, also referring to a corpse, runs, ‘O keep the Dog far hence that’s friend to men. / Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!’ We never can fully ignore the dog’s feral ancestry, and maybe that is even part of its charm. (Just as cat-owners presumably cherish their tabby’s kinship with the lion.) The animals must answer to some mute wildness in ourselves.

 Out of that inner tension arises the tradition of the werewolf. The title of Kevin Costner’s movie Dances with Wolves (1990), comes from the name given to the hero, John Dunbar, by his Sioux Indian friends because he has befriended a wolf. Like Harry Haller in Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf (1927), Dunbar is divided against himself, part wolf, part man. In Neil Jordan’s film, The Company of Wolves (1984), based on Angela Carter’s book, The Bloody Chamber (1979), the anatomically detailed transformation of man to wolf makes this myth seem almost plausible. The idea is deeply embedded in human culture, from the ancient Greeks and Egyptians to the present day when occasionally people suffer from lycanthropy (belief that they are a wolf or other wild animal). Carter’s book and Jordan’s film reached back into the original violence and rapacious sexuality underlying the familiar folk tales, which have been watered down to nursery stories. Once upon a time they were intended to caution children against wandering alone in the woods and talking to strangers.

Gustave Dore’s illustration for La Fontaine’s fable The Wolf and the Shepherd - if you look closely you can see the sleeping shepherd and his dog in the background. *

  Jean de La Fontaine’s fable, ‘The Wolf and the Shepherd’ (1668-94), reverses the tradition to tell the story of a wolf who, in the guise of a shepherd, tries to lure a flock of sheep only to be discovered when he speaks. His deep voice waking the shepherd and his dog they give chase but the wolf’s escape is hampered by his stolen cloak. The moral is that a scoundrel always makes some mistake. A wolf should stick to being a wolf.   

  Even in eleventh century Persia the moon and the wolf were allied.

The sea is baying like a wolf tonight;

  It springs in fury on the cliffs; but soon

The waves in wild disorder will retreat,

  Obedient to the influence of the moon.  

(Farrukhi, d. 1037, trans from the Persian by J.C.E. Bowen)

Dore’s illustration for La Fontaine’s fable ‘The Animal in the Moon’*

The moon, however, is a different story. As Farrukhi has it, the moon is a regulator of time and tides, famously allied to female hormones and so often figured as a woman. That image can flip from benign and maternal to the association with witches, once regarded as healers, later demonised. By contrast with the blazing energy of the sun, the moon’s light is soft and changeable. Set against the night sky, its sphere is easier for us to observe directly, and indeed, to reach. It is a common prop in love poems and songs through the ages. Yet even in that connection the wolf can put in an appearance.

  In his poem ‘Sad Steps’ Philip Larkin writes of the moon seen through his bedroom window:

Groping back to bed after a piss

I part thick curtains, and am startled by   

The rapid clouds, the moon’s cleanliness.


Four o’clock: wedge-shadowed gardens lie   

Under a cavernous, a wind-picked sky.   

There’s something laughable about this,


The way the moon dashes through clouds that blow   

Loosely as cannon-smoke to stand apart   

(Stone-coloured light sharpening the roofs below)


High and preposterous and separate—   

Lozenge of love! Medallion of art!

O wolves of memory! Immensements! No,


One shivers slightly, looking up there.

The hardness and the brightness and the plain   

Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare


Is a reminder of the strength and pain   

Of being young; that it can’t come again,   

But is for others undiminished somewhere.

The title ‘Sad Steps’ brings us back four centuries to Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnet ‘Astrophil and Stella 31’:

With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb'st the skies!

How silently, and with how wan a face!

What, may it be that even in heav'nly place

That busy archer his sharp arrows tries!

Sure, if that long-with love-acquainted eyes

Can judge of love, thou feel'st a lover's case,

I read it in thy looks; thy languish'd grace

To me, that feel the like, thy state descries.

Then, ev'n of fellowship, O Moon, tell me,

Is constant love deem'd there but want of wit?

Are beauties there as proud as here they be?

Do they above love to be lov'd, and yet

Those lovers scorn whom that love doth possess?

Do they call virtue there ungratefulness?

‘Want of wit’, or lunacy, is another classic association with the moon, here ironically allied to the lover’s constancy, although the moon is traditionally seen as inconstant in her waxing and waning. Before Larkin, Wordsworth too had taken up Sidney’s opening lines, quoting them at the beginning of a sonnet, third in a series of ‘Poems Composed During a Tour Chiefly on Foot’ (1807). Here’s the poet walking at night, seeking the moon’s light:

Where art thou? Thou whom I have seen on high

Running among the clouds a wood-nymph’s race?

Unhappy Nuns, whose common breath’s a sigh

Which they would stifle, move at such a pace!  

Leaving the ‘unhappy nuns’ behind, he calls for the power of Merlin to summon forth the Goddess Cynthia, another name for the moon, ‘Queen both for beauty and for majesty’. Magic and mystery are intertwined in the moon’s evanescence.

For all his downbeat tone and mocking attitude, Larkin can’t resist the romantic appeal of the moon which ‘dashes through clouds that blow’ just as Wordsworth’s is remembered ‘Running among the clouds’. Both poets harking back to Sidney’s moon which mirrors Astrophil’s lovelorn state. Sidney closes his sonnet with an insistent and witty repetition of the word ‘love’, and its derivatives, ‘lov’d’, ‘lovers’, echoed in a chorus of ‘o’s (‘Do’, ‘above’, ‘to’, ‘those’, ‘scorn’, ‘whom’, ‘doth’, ‘possess’, ‘Do’) which seem to imprint the round face of the moon on the page, like an incantation. A prayer, not a howl.

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Thank you for joining me here. If you do go out to look at the moon tomorrow night why not share your impressions here. I look forward to hearing from you - as long as you’re not howling!

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 * These illustrations come from a beautiful book I bought in France last summer. Unfortunately, my puppy, Magnus, took a fancy to it too and ate half the spine! You can’t take all of the wolf out of the dog no matter how cute!