Blood and the Moon

I

 

Blessed be this place,

More blessed still this tower;

A bloody, arrogant power

Rose out of the race

Uttering, mastering it,

Rose like these walls from these

Storm-beaten cottages--

In mockery I have set

A powerful emblem up,

And sing it rhyme upon rhyme

In mockery of a time

Half dead at the top.

 

II

Alexandria's was a beacon tower, and Babylon's

An image of the moving heavens, a log-book of the sun's journey and the moon's;

And Shelley had his towers, thought's crowned powers he called them once.

 

I declare this tower is my symbol; I declare

This winding, gyring, spiring treadmill of a stair is my ancestral stair;

That Goldsmith and Dean, Berkeley and Burke, have travelled there.

 

Swift beating on his breast in sibyllene frenzy blind

Because the heart in his blood-sodden breast had dragged him down into mankind,

Goldsmith deliberately sipping at the honey-pot of his mind,

 

And haughtier-headed Burke that proved the State a tree,

That this unconquerable labyrinth of the birds, century after century,

Cast but dead leaves to mathematical equality;

 

And God-appointed Berkeley that proved all things a dream,

That this pragmatical, preposterous pig of a world, its farrow that so solid seem,

Must vanish on the instant if the mind but change its theme;

 

Saeva Indignatio and the labourer's hire,

The strength that gives our blood and state magnanimity of its own desire;

Everything that is not God consumed with intellectual fire.

 

III

The purity of the unclouded moon

Has flung its arrowy shaft upon the floor.

Seven centuries have passed and it is pure,

The blood of innocence has left no stain.

There, on blood-saturated ground, have stood

Soldier, assassin, executioner.

Whether for daily pittance or in blind fear

Or out of abstract hatred, and shed blood,

But could not cast a single jet thereon.

Odour of blood on the ancestral stair!

And we that have shed none must gather there

And clamour in drunken frenzy for the moon.

 

IV

Upon the dusty, glittering windows cling,

And seem to cling upon the moonlit skies, 

Tortoiseshell butterflies,k peacock butterflies,

A couple of night-moths are on the wing.

Is every modern nation like the tower,

Half dead at the top?  No matter what I said,

For wisdom is the property of the dead,

A something incompatible with life; and power,

Like everything that has the stian of blood,

A property of the living; but no stain

Can come upon the visage of the moon

When it has looked in glory form a cloud.

 

 

The Two Trees

 

Beloved, gaze in thine own heart,

The holy tree is growing there;

From joy the holy branches start,

And all the trembling flowers they bear.

 

The changing colours of its fruit

Have dowered the stars with merry light;

The surety of its hidden root

Has planted quiet in the night;

 

The shaking of its leafy head

Has given the waves their melody,

And made my lips and music wed,

Murmuring a wizard song for thee.

 

There the Loves a circle go,

The flaming circle of our days,

Gyring, spiring to and fro

In those great ignorant leafy ways;

 

Remembering all that shaken hair

and how the winged sandals dart,

Thine eyes grow full of tender care:

Beloved, gaze in thine own heart.

 

Gaze no more in the bitter glass

The demons, with their subtle guile,

Lift up before us when they pass,

Or only gaze a little while;

 

For there a fatal image grows

That the stormy night receives,

Roots half hidden under snows,

Broken boughs and blackened leaves.

 

For all things turn to barenness

In the dim glass the demons hold,

The glass of outer weariness,

Make when God slept in times of old.

 

There, though the broken branches, go

The ravens of unresting thought;

Flying, crying, to and fro,

Cruel claw and hungry throat,

 

Or else they stand and sniff the wind,

And shake their ragged wings; alas!

Thy tender eyes grow all unkind:

Gaze no more in the bitter glass.

 

Another of my favourites by Yeats!  Loreena McKennitt does a really cool song with this one.