LiederNet logo

CONTENTS

×
  • Home | Introduction
  • Composers (20,082)
  • Text Authors (19,398)
  • Go to a Random Text
  • What’s New
  • A Small Tour
  • FAQ & Links
  • Donors
  • DONATE

UTILITIES

  • Search Everything
  • Search by Surname
  • Search by Title or First Line
  • Search by Year
  • Search by Collection

CREDITS

  • Emily Ezust
  • Contributors (1,113)
  • Contact Information
  • Bibliography

  • Copyright Statement
  • Privacy Policy

Follow us on Facebook

by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892 - 1950)

Now by this moon, before this moon shall...
Language: English 
Now by this moon, before this moon shall wane
I shall be dead or I shall be with you!
No moral concept can outweigh the pain
Past rack and wheel this absence puts me through;
Faith, honour, pride, endurance, what the tongues
Of tedious men will say, or what the law --
For which of these do I fill up my lungs
With brine and fire at every breath I draw?
Time, and to spare, for patience by and by,
Time to be cold and time to sleep alone;
Let me no more until the hour I die
Defraud my innocent senses of their own.
Before this moon shall darken, say of me:
She's in her grave, or where she wants to be.

About the headline (FAQ)

Text Authorship:

  • by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892 - 1950), no title, appears in Fatal Interview, first published 1931 [author's text checked 1 time against a primary source]

Musical settings (art songs, Lieder, mélodies, (etc.), choral pieces, and other vocal works set to this text), listed by composer (not necessarily exhaustive):

  • by Ellis Bonoff Kohs (b. 1916), "Absence" [ low voice and piano ], from Fatal Interview [sung text not yet checked]
  • by Jay Poûhe (b. 1935), "Now by this moon, before this moon shall wane", published 1971 [ medium voice and piano ], from The Amorous Line, no. 2 [sung text not yet checked]

Researcher for this text: Emily Ezust [Administrator]

This text was added to the website: 2008-10-02
Line count: 14
Word count: 122

Gentle Reminder

This website began in 1995 as a personal project by Emily Ezust, who has been working on it full-time without a salary since 2008. Our research has never had any government or institutional funding, so if you found the information here useful, please consider making a donation. Your help is greatly appreciated!
–Emily Ezust, Founder

Donate

We use cookies for internal analytics and to earn much-needed advertising revenue. (Did you know you can help support us by turning off ad-blockers?) To learn more, see our Privacy Policy. To learn how to opt out of cookies, please visit this site.

I acknowledge the use of cookies

Contact
Copyright
Privacy

Copyright © 2025 The LiederNet Archive

Site redesign by Shawn Thuris