Two men in coats stand beside a large tree, gazing at a crescent moon in a dusky sky.

Winter in the Newest World

The figures in Friedrich’s painting are entirely embodied, present with their thoughts and with each other, just as I have longed to be.

It was moving to find that, despite two centuries of distance, Caspar David Friedrich and I share some obsessions, such as the moments of transition on either side of day, the awe of the natural world, and, since both of us lost family at young ages—his loss including the deaths of three of his siblings—the notes of grief that can ring below the surface of a landscape. I discovered Friedrich’s Two Men Contemplating the Moon (ca. 1825–30) after daylight savings had wrested another precious hour of light from our winter evenings, and I was feeling the effects of this combined with a New England in the pallor of climate change, which is to say without snow to cushion the bone-bracing cold.


I was struck by the way these two men—one of them perhaps Friedrich himself—take in the moon as an act of togetherness, a wondrous moment that gentles even the wickedness encroaching closer to the painting’s frame. Theirs was a time, I imagine, of sublimity and greater mystery, when the moon’s appearance was a rapturous event that could arrest an onlooker’s attention, an attention that has become more difficult to capture in our newest world. The figures in Friedrich’s painting are entirely embodied, present with their thoughts and with each other, just as I have longed to be this winter, when the pull of staying in and squandering my afternoon feels insurmountable. My sense of absence leaves me feeling down on myself, on how I’ve let time scroll by instead of letting it hold the wonder that is still possible, if only I could get back into my neighborhood or to the wilderness.

Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840). Two Men Contemplating the Moon, ca. 1825–30. Oil on canvas. 13 3/4 x 17 1/4 in. (34.9 x 43.8 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Wrightsman Fund, 2000 (2000.51)

"Winter in the Newest World" by Emily Pittinos

Cover Image for Winter in the Newest World

Winter in the Newest World

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As the sky grims to a gloom that comes too early,
the day still puddle-deep
and puny at its spent end,
I must remind myself that evening’s entered
at the edge of every day of every winter of every life,

just as it did for these two men, pausing
on their noble walk to piss beside a stone, and then
remembering where they were, taking in
a simple blush of moon.
And being where, and when, and who they were—
divinity-stricken, grief-beckoned, their cheeks pinked,
perhaps by an emptied flask—they held the gaze.

When was I last held
by the hush of a grove’s sudden plush, the outer cold
making obvious my inner heat?
Indoors, this screen-lit winter
coaxes me to waste toward an absent form, missing

how snowfall can soften even loneliness
into piousness, how dappled saplings can huddle
as siblings, intertwined.
Inside, instead of doing, I shrink
as daylight does, nightfall now so soon, so
moonless, snowless, restless—it’s true,
even through a phony glow,
I see the brushstrokes in all that I do.


Poem by Emily Pittinos


Contributors

Emily Pittinos
Poet

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