The Quiet Moon: Pathways to an Ancient Way of Being

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In his great poem ‘Frost at Midnight’, written in February 1798, under a new moon, Coleridge is listening. And inviting us to listen with him. To the silence of frost on a windless night. Broken by the call of an owlet. His ear notices that it’s an owlet, rather than an owl. A young owl. Inside the cottage, it is calm. His baby son Hartley slumbers in his arms. The poem that emerges is a listening meditation. Listen. The December full moon is known as the Cold Moon, Singing Moon or Wolf Moon by ancient Celts. It is a time to celebrate Yule or the Winter Solstice and the return of longer days. Spend time with family and friends and celebrate the beginning of winter. This in some ways is incredibly difficult to review. I can’t really put my finger on the exact reason why, but I really liked this book. But, I think it is because he is forging his own philosophy in his local landscape. There are things he writes about that I haven’t contemplated yet and need time to go away and think about them. The full moon names were associated with specific natural events, cultural practices, and spiritual beliefs prevalent during different months of the year. From the Quiet Moon reflecting rest and reflection to the Grain Moon signifying feasts and festivals, these names provide insights into the Celts’ seasonal activities, rituals, and societal values. The moon names served as both symbolic expressions and practical guides for the Celts’ daily lives and communal interactions.

According to Celtic tradition, the April full moon is known as the Growing Moon or the Pink Moon. It is the season of love and conception and is a good time to focus on romantic relationships, conceiving a child, and taking continued actions toward your goals. It would also represent the beginning of growth of the harvest in Ancient Celtic communities. The Celts also wrote about the moon and stars in their mythology and folklore, as many Celtic stories and legends featured characters who had a close connection with the celestial bodies. A synchronous rotation keeps one side of the moon shrouded in mystery from our perspective. It takes about as long for the moon to turn on its axis as it does to orbit Earth, so it keeps the same face towards us – the one known in folk tales as the Man In The Moon, a vaguely face-shaped pattern seen in the dark and light of lunar craters.

The November full moon was known by the ancient Celts as the Dark Moon or Oak Moon. In the northern hemisphere, the November full moon falls among the shortest days of the year. The first full moon in the Wheel of the Year, November is a good time to cultivate healthy habits and continue to let go of negative energy. Parr doesn’t shy away from personal narratives in the book. Some of them are very honest and give the book an alloy-like strength. His struggles with mental health and anecdotes from his younger years actually elevate the core sense of this book- the way of being- life being a vast sum of cycles and seasons.

In each chapter, we join Parr on his walks in his part of West Dorset. It is partly a history book and partly a natural history book and interwoven with these two main threads is a dusting of folklore, travel, memoir and musings on modern life. At times it feels like a confessional as he opens up about personal matters and other things that have been troubling his mind. As he immerses himself in research about the Celts way of life he realises that there is no clear definition of them and he fills in the gaps in a way that makes sense to him. Star sound carried across vast distances, amplified by the poet’s imagining ear, to the intimacy of a whisper, “a faint thing”, a candle’s gentle sputter, “too faint to read by”. Moving between eye and ear, light and sound, the poem explores what it means to perceive stars, shifting scale and register, oscillating between far away and intimate. ‘A Star Here and a Star There’ is the first of the concluding sequence of poems in Oswald’s third collection Woods etc. (2005) that explore the further reaches of our skies, from moon to the deep silence of space, including ‘Moon Hymn’, ‘Various Portents’, ‘Excursion to the Planet Mercury’, and ‘Sonnet’, the final poem in the collection, which describes “Spacecraft Voyager 1 boldly gone / into Deep Silence”.

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Other Celtic full moon names for October are the Harvest Moon, Seed Fall Moon, and Hunter’s Moon. It’s a time to honor loved ones who have passed on and do physical and spiritual house cleaning. This is most embodied through the Celtic festival of Halloween. a way of forcing a poem open to what lies bodily beyond it. Because the eye is an instrument tuned to surfaces, but the ear tells you about volume, depth, content – like tapping a large iron shape to find if it’s full or not. The ear hears into, not just what surrounds it. And the whole challenge of poetry is to keep language open, so that what we don’t know yet can pass through it. The ancient Celts lived by and worshipped the moon. While modern, digital life is often at odds with nature – rubbing against it rather than working in harmony with it – is there something to be said for embracing this ancient way of being and reconnecting to the moon’s natural calendar?* One man who has found that following a lunar cycle helps him deal with modern life and all the crap that it throws at him is Kevin Parr. He has slowly come to the conclusion that this less regimented way of marking time helps him become more in tune with the natural rhythms of nature and as a bonus, it has helped him no end with his mental health. The stars were particularly important to the Celts during their travels as they were used to navigate during the night.

The naming of the full moons often corresponded to specific events and celebrations, such as harvest season. Can you provide more information about the connection between the Celtic people and celestial bodies like stars? That repeated word “loud”, describing the “owlet’s cry”, primes our ears, or rather, our mind’s ear, or what Robert Frost called the imagining ear, to listen for a certain pitch of sound, heightening the shift into quiet that follows. Through the calm, the “strange and extreme silentness”, a thin blue flame comes into focus. Perfectly still. Not a quiver. Like the string of a lute, silent in stillness. Only the film of soot is moving now, fluttering on the grate, not still as in quiet, but, with a slight adjustment, still fluttering, moving, continuing to move, against the grate of the fire. It is “the sole unquiet thing”. The size of the font increases again, and now swans (white) appear, and then a gap in the poem, a pause, white space, creating a sense of quiet suspense as we listen again in anticipation, before the poem shifts into another time. Hadfield plays with white space, indenting lines and adding space between lines instead of conventional punctuation to suggest pauses as well as shifts in sound:The specific names and meanings associated with each full moon were related to particular events, such as the harvest season, and were used to set intentions, celebrate new beginnings, and reflect on personal growth and positivity. January’s Quiet Moon reflects an air of melancholy, illuminating a midwinter of quiet menace; it was the time of the Dark Days for the ancient Celts, when the natural world balances on a knife edge. By May, the Bright Moon brings happiness as time slows, mayflies cloud and elderflowers cascade.

The June full moon was known to the ancient Celts as the Mead Moon or the Horse Moon. It was believed that a newly married couple should drink mead for one full moon cycle to promote good health, prosperity and fertility. June is a time to celebrate the longest day of the year with Litha and the Summer Equinox. Spend time outside, enjoying the long days and abundant sunshine. This is the season of Imbolc, a time to set intentions for the coming year and focus on personal growth.Another one of our favorite Celtic full moon names is Harvest moon. It is one of the names of the October full moon.