“Gall of goat, and slips of yew,
Sliver’d in the moon’s eclipse.”
As a harbinger of misfortune it is referred to in “Antony and Cleopatra,” where (iii. 13), Antony says:
“Alack, our terrene moon
Is now eclipsed; and it portends alone
The fall of Antony!”
Milton, in his “Paradise Lost” (bk. i. 597), speaks much in the same strain:
“as when the sun new-risen
Looks through the horizontal misty air
Shorn of his beams, or from behind the moon
In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds
On half the nations.”
And in “Lycidas,” he says of the unlucky ship that was wrecked:
“It was that fatal and perfidious bark
Built in the eclipse.”
Its sanguine color is also mentioned as an indication of coming disasters in “Richard II.” (ii. 4), where the Welsh captain remarks how:
“The pale-faced moon looks bloody on the earth.”
And its paleness, too, in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (ii. 2), is spoken of as an unpropitious sign.