As mortals see
The floating bark of the light-laden moon
With that white star, its sightless pilot's crest,
Borne down the rapid sunset's ebbing sea.
May it be suggested in this case also that the inadvertent second use of the word ebbing was in unconscious reminiscence of the first right use? For another description of the crescent moon, see The Triumph of Life, vv. 78-84:—
Like the young moon,
When on the sunlit limits of the night
Her white shell trembles amid crystal air,
And whilst the sleeping tempest gathers might
Doth, as the herald of its coming, bear
The ghost of her dead mother, whose dim form
Bends in dark ether from her infant's chair;
the same omen of tempest having been marked by Coleridge, with a reference to what he terms "the grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spens"; the antiquity since much disputed.
(c) Near the end of Act IV. Demogorgon summons
Ye happy Dead! whom beams of brightest verse
Are clouds to hide, not colours to portray,
Whether your nature is that universe
Which once ye saw and suffered
A Voice from Beneath.Or as they
Whom we have left, we change and pass away.
Is there any real meaning in this response? They whom the dead have left are their living fellows, who only change and pass away in becoming also of the dead. Nor can I discern any real disjunctive opposition
