Meaning & Analysis
The proverb literally compares a person or situation's variability to the ever-changing phases of the moon, which visibly waxes and wanes in the night sky.
Insights
Emotional Volatility
Describes a person who is emotionally volatile, with moods that shift unpredictably from bright and cheerful (like a full moon) to dark and withdrawn (like a new moon).
Fickleness in Affection
Characterizes someone who is unreliable in their affections, loyalty, or commitments. Their promises and feelings are seen as transient and subject to constant, baseless change.
Instability of Fortune
Symbolizes the unpredictable nature of fortune, status, or circumstances, which can improve (wax) or decline (wane) without warning, reflecting life's inherent instability.
Astrological and Cosmological Roots
The proverb is rooted in ancient astrological and cosmological beliefs that the moon's phases directly influence human emotions, health, and destiny. This connection imbues the simile with a sense of natural, almost cosmic, inevitability, suggesting that the subject's inconstancy is as fundamental as the celestial cycles.
Gender and Misogyny
Historically, the comparison has been overwhelmingly applied to women, as seen in the quotations from Florio and Heywood. This reflects a persistent misogynistic trope in Western culture that portrays women as inherently irrational, emotionally volatile, and fickle, governed by natural cycles ('lunacy') rather than steadfast reason.
Archetype of Duality
The moon's constant transformation from darkness to light and back again serves as a powerful literary and psychological symbol for the dualities of human nature—creation and destruction, sanity and madness, clarity and confusion. The proverb taps into this deep archetypal meaning.
Literary Resonance
Shakespeare masterfully uses this trope, most famously when Juliet admonishes Romeo, 'O, swear not by the moon, th' inconstant moon,' seeking a love that transcends the fickleness symbolized by the celestial body. This highlights the proverb's cultural weight as a definitive symbol of unreliability.
Rhetorical Devices
Simile
The proverb is a direct simile, using 'as' to explicitly compare the abstract quality of inconstancy to the concrete, observable phenomenon of the moon's changing phases.
Symbolism
The moon functions as a universal and ancient symbol for change, cycles, the passage of time, and emotional flux, giving the proverb its immediate and profound resonance.
Personification
By attributing the human characteristic of 'inconstancy' to the moon, the proverb personifies the celestial object, making the comparison more intimate and rhetorically effective.
Transcription
Quotations
(Women are) Like to the Moone whose operation it is often times to change.
Put not thy confidence in any woman, For like the Moone, shee changeth, to undoo man.
So that as changefull as the moone men use to say.
And women all are govern'd by the moon, Which is, you know, a planet that will change.
They shall live continent, and leave to range But men [like to the moon] each month must change.
The change of his clothes is as frequent as the Moones.
This fellow, tutor, Waxes and wanes a hundred times a minute! In my conscience, he was got in change of the moon.
To be more mutable than the moon, viz. inconstant.
Shakespeare Citations
Thus change I like the moon.
And the moon changes even as your mind.
O, swear not by the moon, th' inconstant moon.
The fortune of us that are the moon's men doth ebb and flow like the sea.
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
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