H. P. Lovecraft's What the Moon Brings, Explained: A Detailed Summary and Literary Analysis
- Michael Kellermeyer
- May 28
- 4 min read
The following prose-poem is not nearly as famous or effective as “Nyarlathotep,” but its eerie, nightmarish atmospherics and earnest philosophical message make it surprisingly memorable for so short an episode. One of his “Poe pieces,” this work takes obvious inspiration from Poe’s own prose-poem, “Silence – A Fable.”
It is told to a traveler by a demon or djinn living in a tomb, and describes a mind-bending region in an undiscovered country – a mad, surreal landscape of shrieking water lilies (they’re creepier than it sounds), sulfurous skies, palpitating mud, bloody rain, bubbling, current-less rivers, and ominous forests of impossibly tall, ever-swaying trees, all apocalyptically illuminated by a crimson moon.
The demon notices a world-weary philosopher in a toga standing at the top of a huge rock, calmly resisting each new vision of chaos. The demon sees the world DESOLATION carved into the monolith and notices that each wave of horror comes with a rush of wild noise and flailing movement, but none of these tangible horrors flap the resilient intellectual. The demon accepts this as a challenge, and puts a curse of silence on the landscape. His gambol pays off: when everything falls perfectly still, dark, and silent, the philosopher crumbles and flees, his will broken by the specter of ultimate oblivion, and the carving on the monolith now spells SILENCE.
Like Poe, Lovecraft means to create a nightmarish aesthetic in order to express his own horror of mortality, and while the result isn’t as tidily executed as Poe’s, it comes with some genuinely unsettling images and ideas.
SUMMARY
“I hate the moon—I am afraid of it—for when it shines on certain scenes familiar and loved it sometimes makes them unfamiliar and hideous…”
An unnamed narrator explains his fear of the moon, whose strange light transforms beloved places into scenes of terror. One summer night, while wandering an old garden under moonlight, he notices that the familiar stream has become uncanny, its rippling waters seeming drawn irresistibly toward “strange oceans that are not in the world.” White lotus blossoms drift into the current, their faces resembling calm, dead visages that silently beckon him onward.
Compelled by fear and fascination, the narrator follows the stream through a garden that no longer obeys ordinary limits. Walls disappear, replaced by endless vistas of trees, pagodas, idols, and marble bridges. The whispering lotus-faces urge him onward until the stream widens into a river and finally empties into a vast, nameless sea beneath the hateful moon.
As the tide withdraws, a drowned city emerges from the depths—its towers, spires, and seaweed-draped ruins exposed amid a terrible stench. The narrator realizes this place is where “all the dead had come,” their flesh consumed by monstrous sea-worms beneath the shallows.
Suddenly, he perceives that a distant reef is actually part of a colossal submerged being—a monstrous idol-like entity rising from the abyss. Terrified that its hidden face and eyes might emerge, he flees into the corpse-filled waters to escape its dreadful gaze.
SUMMARY
Although it is unquestionably a minor work, the imaginative creepiness of “What the Moon Brings”’ scant 761 words is arguably more direct and successful at addressing “The Nameless City”’s ostensible cosmicism, and provides a more efficient illustration of Abdul Alhazred’s cryptic couplet, “That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.”
Joshi called it “nebulous … dream-like” speculating – with good reason, though without documentation – that it was likely inspired by another one of Lovecraft’s beloved dreams.
Kenneth Hite declares its “dead, dripping city,” colossal submarine idol, and hideous, unbearable, suicide-inducing secret as yet another series of steps in the incremental march to “The Call of Cthulhu,” (though he dismisses its surreal “weird side bits” as tedious misfires). Like “Silence,” its primary message is one of existential despair, mourning the same mortal anxieties which haunt Poe’s more famous pieces, “The Raven,” “Ulalume,” “Lenore,” “Annabel Lee,” “The Haunted Palace,” “The Conqueror Worm,” and “A Dream Within a Dream.”
He borrows Poe’s symbols of murmuring, personified flowers, the sinister influence of the moon, a mysterious monolith, and disordered nature to represent the gutting discombobulation of Oblivion – a realization that makes a mockery of all human efforts and virtues, which are washed out in the tide of time like so much flotsam.
Using the moon as a metaphor for mortality (“I hate the moon—I am afraid of it—for when it shines on certain scenes familiar and loved it sometimes makes them unfamiliar and hideous”), the narrator ponders how the mere idea of death taints everything that it touches, polluting his pleasures and despoiling his dreams, which slip away from him like flowers pulled out to sea on the tide.
As the lunar light of death chips away at his relationships and overshadows his passions, he finds himself yearning to learn the truth behind humanity’s purpose and fate – and that of his departed loved ones. But the closer he comes to uncovering it, the more horrified he is, ultimately choosing to destroy himself rather than to stay long enough to learn the identity, intentions, motives, or significance of the reigning idol who rules the watery realms of Oblivion.