The Cat and the Moon

The cat went here and there
And the moon spun round like a top,
And the nearest kin of the moon,
The creeping cat, looked up.


Black Minnaloushe stared at the moon,
For, wander and wail as he would,
The pure cold light in the sky
Troubled his animal blood.


Minnaloushe runs in the grass
Lifting his delicate feet.
Do you dance, Minnaloushe, do you dance ?
When two close kindred meet.


What better than call a dance ?
Maybe the moon may learn,
Tired of that courtly fashion,
A new dance turn.


Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
From moonlit place to place,
The sacred moon overhead
Has taken a new phase.


Does Minnaloushe know that his pupils
Will pass from change to change,
And that from round to crescent,
From crescent to round they range ?


Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
Alone, important and wise,
And lifts to the changing moon
His changing eyes.

William Butler Yeats, tiré de The Wild Swans at Coole (1919)

The Crazed Moon

Crazed through much child-bearing
The moon is staggering in the sky ;
Moon-struck by the despairing
Glances of her wandering eye
We grope, and grope in vain,
For children born of her pain.


Children dazed or dead !
When she in all her virginal pride
First trod on the mountain’s head
What stir ran through the countryside
Where every foot obeyed her glance !
What manhood led the dance !


Fly-catchers of the moon,
Our hands are blenched, our fingers seem
But slender needles of bone ;
Blenched by that malicious dream
They are spread wide that each
May rend what comes in reach.

William Butler Yeats, tiré de The Winding Stair and Other Poems

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet :
But I, being poor, have only my dreams ;
I have spread my dreams under your feet ;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

William Butler Yeats, tiré de The Wind Among the Reeds (1889)

He Thinks of His Past When A Part of the Constellations of Heaven

I have drunk ale from the Country of the Young
And weep because I know all things now :
I have been a hazel-tree, and they hung
The Pilot Star and the Crooked Plough
Among my leaves in times out of mind :
I became a rush that horses tread :
I became a man, a hater of the wind,
Knowing one, out of all things, alone, that his head
May not lie on the breast nor his lips on the hair
Of the woman that he loves, until he dies.
O beast of the wilderness, bird of the air,
Must I endure your amorous cries ?

William Butler Yeats, tiré de The Wind Among the Reeds (1889)

The Phases of the Moon

An old man cocked his car upon a bridge ;
He and his friend, their faces to the South,
Had trod the uneven road. Their hoots were soiled,
Their Connemara cloth worn out of shape ;
They had kept a steady pace as though their beds,
Despite a dwindling and late-risen moon,
Were distant still. An old man cocked his ear.


Aherne. What made that Sound ?


Robartes. A rat or water-hen
Splashed, or an otter slid into the stream.
We are on the bridge; that shadow is the tower,
And the light proves that he is reading still.
He has found, after the manner of his kind,
Mere images; chosen this place to live in
Because, it may be, of the candle-light
From the far tower where Milton’s Platonist
Sat late, or Shelley’s visionary prince :
The lonely light that Samuel Palmer engraved,
An image of mysterious wisdom won by toil ;
And now he seeks in book or manuscript
What he shall never find.


Aherne. Why should not you
Who know it all ring at his door, and speak
Just truth enough to show that his whole life
Will scarcely find for him a broken crust
Of all those truths that are your daily bread ;
And when you have spoken take the roads again ?


Robartes. He wrote of me in that extravagant style
He had learnt from pater, and to round his tale
Said I was dead; and dead I choose to be.


Aherne. Sing me the changes of the moon once more ;
True song, though speech : "mine author sung it me."


Robartes. Twenty-and-eight the phases of the moon,
The full and the moon’s dark and all the crescents,
Twenty-and-eight, and yet but six-and-twenty
The cradles that a man must needs be rocked in :
For there’s no human life at the full or the dark.
From the first crescent to the half, the dream
But summons to adventure and the man
Is always happy like a bird or a beast ;
But while the moon is rounding towards the full
He follows whatever whim’s most difficult
Among whims not impossible, and though scarred.
As with the cat-o’-nine-tails of the mind,
His body moulded from within his body
Grows comelier. Eleven pass, and then
Athene takes Achilles by the hair,
Hector is in the dust, Nietzsche is born,
Because the hero’s crescent is the twelfth.
And yet, twice born, twice buried, grow he must,
Before the full moon, helpless as a worm.
The thirteenth moon but sets the soul at war
In its own being, and when that war’s begun
There is no muscle in the arm; and after,
Under the frenzy of the fourteenth moon,
The soul begins to tremble into stillness,
To die into the labyrinth of itself !


Aherne. Sing out the song ; sing to the end, and sing
The strange reward of all that discipline.


Robartes. All thought becomes an image and the soul
Becomes a body: that body and that soul
Too perfect at the full to lie in a cradle,
Too lonely for the traffic of the world :
Body and soul cast out and cast away
Beyond the visible world.


Aherne. All dreams of the soul
End in a beautiful man’s or woman’s body.


Robartes, Have you not always known it ?


Aherne. The song will have it
That those that we have loved got their long fingers
From death, and wounds, or on Sinai’s top,
Or from some bloody whip in their own hands.
They ran from cradle to cradle till at last
Their beauty dropped out of the loneliness
Of body and soul.


Robartes. The lover’s heart knows that.


Aherne. It must be that the terror in their eyes
Is memory or foreknowledge of the hour
When all is fed with light and heaven is bare.


Robartes. When the moon’s full those creatures of the full
Are met on the waste hills by countrymen
Who shudder and hurry by: body and soul
Estranged amid the strangeness of themselves,
Caught up in contemplation, the mind’s eye
Fixed upon images that once were thought ;
For separate, perfect, and immovable
Images can break the solitude
Of lovely, satisfied, indifferent eyes.


And thereupon with aged, high-pitched voice
Aherne laughed, thinking of the man within,
His sleepless candle and laborious pen.


Robartes. And after that the crumbling of the moon.
The soul remembering its loneliness
Shudders in many cradles; all is changed,
It would be the world’s servant, and as it serves,
Choosing whatever task’s most difficult
Among tasks not impossible, it takes
Upon the body and upon the soul
The coarseness of the drudge.


Aherne. Before the full
It sought itself and afterwards the world.


Robartes. Because you are forgotten, half out of life,
And never wrote a book, your thought is clear.
Reformer, merchant, statesman, learned man,
Dutiful husband, honest wife by turn,
Cradle upon cradle, and all in flight and all
Deformed because there is no deformity
But saves us from a dream.


Aherne. And what of those
That the last servile crescent has set free ?


Robartes. Because all dark, like those that are all light,
They are cast beyond the verge, and in a cloud,
Crying to one another like the bats ;
And having no desire they cannot tell
What’s good or bad, or what it is to triumph
At the perfection of one’s own obedience ;
And yet they speak what’s blown into the mind ;
Deformed beyond deformity, unformed,
Insipid as the dough before it is baked,
They change their bodies at a word.


Aherne. And then ?


Robartes. When all the dough has been so kneaded up
That it can take what form cook Nature fancies,
The first thin crescent is wheeled round once more.


Aherne. But the escape ; the song’s not finished yet.


Robartes. Hunchback and Saint and Fool are the last crescents.
The burning bow that once could shoot an arrow
Out of the up and down, the wagon-wheel
Of beauty’s cruelty and wisdom’s chatter --
Out of that raving tide -- is drawn betwixt
Deformity of body and of mind.


Aherne. Were not our beds far off I’d ring the bell,
Stand under the rough roof-timbers of the hall
Beside the castle door, where all is stark
Austerity, a place set out for wisdom
That he will never find ; I’d play a part ;
He would never know me after all these years
But take me for some drunken countryman :
I’d stand and mutter there until he caught
"Hunchback and Saint and Fool," and that they came
Under the three last crescents of the moon.
And then I’d stagger out. He’d crack his wits
Day after day, yet never find the meaning.


And then he laughed to think that what seemed hard
Should be so simple —- a bat rose from the hazels
And circled round him with its squeaky cry,
The light in the tower window was put out.

William Butler Yeats, tiré de The Wild Swans at Coole (1919)

The Song of the Happy Shepherd

The woods of Arcady are dead,
And over is their antique joy ;
Of old the world on dreaming fed ;
Grey Truth is now her painted toy ;
Yet still she turns her restless head :
But O, sick children of the world,
Of all the many changing things
In dreary dancing past us whirled,
To the cracked tune that Chronos sings,
Words alone are certain good.
Where are now the warring kings,
Word be-mockers ? -- By the Rood,
Where are now the watring kings ?
An idle word is now their glory,
By the stammering schoolboy said,
Reading some entangled story :
The kings of the old time are dead ;
The wandering earth herself may be
Only a sudden flaming word,
In clanging space a moment heard,
Troubling the endless reverie.
Then nowise worship dusty deeds,
Nor seek, for this is also sooth,
To hunger fiercely after truth,
Lest all thy toiling only breeds
New dreams, new dreams ; there is no truth
Saving in thine own heart. Seek, then,
No learning from the starry men,
Who follow with the optic glass
The whirling ways of stars that pass --
Seek, then, for this is also sooth,
No word of theirs -- the cold star-bane
Has cloven and rent their hearts in twain,
And dead is all their human truth.
Go gather by the humming sea
Some twisted, echo-harbouring shell.
And to its lips thy story tell,
And they thy comforters will be.
Rewording in melodious guile
Thy fretful words a little while,
Till they shall singing fade in ruth
And die a pearly brotherhood ;
For words alone are certain good :
Sing, then, for this is also sooth.
I must be gone: there is a grave
Where daffodil and lily wave,
And I would please the hapless faun,
Buried under the sleepy ground,
With mirthful songs before the dawn.
His shouting days with mirth were crowned ;
And still I dream he treads the lawn,
Walking ghostly in the dew,
Pierced by my glad singing through,
My songs of old earth's dreamy youth :
But ah ! she dreams not now; dream thou !
For fair are poppies on the brow :
Dream, dream, for this is also sooth.

William Butler Yeats, tiré de Crossways (1889)

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