If you search the internet for a Shelley poem on the moon then you always find this poem:

To the Moon

I

Art thou pale for weariness

Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,

Wandering companionless

Among the stars that have a different birth, —

And ever changing, like a joyless eye

That finds no object worth its constancy?

II

Thou chosen sister of the Spirit,

That gazes on thee till in thee it pities …

In this  poem the Moon is pale, weary, companionless, and to be pitied, but in another Shelley poem about the Moon, it is a lover, a crystal paramour, a most enamoured maiden, filled with the pleasure of love, and gazing on the object of its love from every side. The object of the moon’s love is the Earth.

I encountered this poem, which doesn’t seem to have a title, in The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes, the biographer of Coleridge. The book celebrates an age of what Holmes calls romantic science, which began with the voyage of Joseph Banks to the South Seas in 1768-71 and ended with the death of Humphrey Davy in 1829. It was a time when science and the arts were not far apart, scientists wrote beautifully, and poets incorporated the wonders of science into their poems, and the public was excited by the discoveries of science.

As Holmes points out, the first six lines of Shelley’s not-well-known poem evoke for modern readers the famous picture of the earth taken by astronauts to the moon:

Thou art speeding round the sun

Brightest world of many a one;

Green and azure sphere which shinest

With a light which is divinest

Among all the lamps of Heaven

To whom light and life is given…

The Moon’s love poem to the Earth

Thou art speeding round the sun

Brightest world of many a one;

Green and azure sphere which shinest

With a light which is divinest

Among all the lamps of Heaven

To whom light and life is given;

I, thy crystal paramour

Borne beside thee by a power

Like the polar Paradise,

Magnet-like of lovers’ eyes;

I, a most enamoured maiden

Whose weak brain is overladen

With the pleasure of her love,

Maniac-like around thee move

Gazing, an insensiate bride,

On thy form from every side…

Holmes, Richard. The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science . HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition.