Moonlight on Manila Bay

A light, serene, ethereal glory rests
Its beams effulgent on each crestling wave;
The silver touches of the moonlight wave
The deep bare bosom that the breeze molests;
While lingering whispers deepen as the wavy crests
Roll with weird rhythm, now gay, now gently grave;
And floods of lambent light appear the sea to pave—
All cast a spell that heeds not time’s behests.

Not always such the scene; the din of fight
Has swelled the murmur of the peaceful air;
Here East and West have oft displayed their might;
Dark battle clouds have dimmed this scene so fair;
Here bold Olympia, one historic night,
Presaging freedom, claimed a people’s care.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on May 21, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.

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Fernando M. Maramág’s sonnet “Moonlight on Manila Bay” first appeared in the The College Folio (February 1912). In Our Scene So Fair: Filipino Poetry in English, 1905–1955 (University of the Philippines Press, 2008), Gémino H. Abad, university professor emeritus at the University of the Philippines Diliman, writes that “Maramág was only nineteen years old when he wrote ‘Moonlight on Manila Bay’: it should perhaps have been sunset over Manila Bay because foreigners often rave over its splendor, but the poet chose moonlight, not because it is more romantic but because, as the poem suggests, it is under cover of darkness—more precisely, by duplicity—that foreigners wrest our country from us. Perhaps, too, the sonnet’s line—‘The deep bare bosom that the breeze molests’—hints at sexual violation as a metaphor for colonization. [. . .] [T]he subversion in Maramág’s poem may well have been unintended. But [. . .] in our reading now, ‘a people’s care’ turns ambiguous with ironic edge [sic], hanging upon a grievous doubt America’s duplicitous claim to ‘Benevolent Assimilation.’ In any case, Maramág’s insistence on our own ‘scene so fair’ in fact becomes, over a century of writing in English (from 1905 to 2005) a chief motive and inspiration for the Filipino poet. For his own scene is nothing less than his lost country whose physical and spiritual geography it is his task to imagine and so rediscover.”

Fernando M. Maramág, born on January 21, 1893, in Ilagan, Isabella, the Republic of the Philippines, was a Filipino poet, critic, and editor. One of the earliest Filipino writers to publish poetry in English, his work appeared in venues such as The College Folio and the Philippines Free Press as well as in the anthology Filipino Poetry (Rodolfo Dato, 1924). He died on October 23, 1936.