Imagine a moonlit night. You are looking out of the window and "breathe in" the night's quiet and miscellaneous sounds of nature. If you gaze deep in itno it, you might discover a new fragile world that you are part of. No, imagine you are the Moon caressing the early landscape with distant light.
Walter de la Mare (1873 - 1958 / Kent / England)
Silver
Slowly, silently, now the moon
Walks the night in her silver shoon;
This way, and that, she peers, and sees
Silver fruit upon silver trees;
One by one the casements catch
Her beams beneath the silvery thatch;
Couched in his kennel, like a log,
With paws of silver sleeps the dog;
From their shadowy cote the white breasts peep
Of doves in silver feathered sleep
A harvest mouse goes scampering by,
With silver claws, and silver eye;
And moveless fish in the water gleam, By silver reeds in a silver stream. This is a comment posted by Linda Armstrong (11/28/2006 12:57:00 AM) This lovely piece is not just for children. The figure of speech you seek is an extended metaphor (and a bit of a joke-poets relish literary humor) . King Midas in the old Greek tale turned everything to gold with a touch of his finger, rendering it lifeless. The very feminine moon in this poem brushes everything with her feet, or with her glance. Everything she sees in the poem is sleeping, except the harvest mouse, which obliquely suggests Ceres, the goddess of the harvest, and her daughter, who spent a portion of the year with Hades in the Underworld (dark-but filled with treasure) .
In the line you quote, 'By silver reeds in a silver stream' the light on the water is being compared to precious metal-transformed by the touch of a personified, female moon. If you think a bit about the treasures available to a dreamer-the riches of the unconscious-you will realize that the moon here is something of a muse. Like an artist (or the poet himself) , she transforms the ordinary world into a paradise that is richly strange-or, for this mystic, as most poets are, reveals a bit of its true nature.
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And of course, the metaphors are really unique, refined and sophisticated. But to my mind, this is the only treasure of the poem.