incommunicado (here are Yeats and my additional unpublished photos of last month’s penumbra moon)

Blood And The Moon

by William Butler Yeats

               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.

        XXX

                       

               III

 

The purity of the unclouded moon

Has flung its atrowy 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,

Tortoise shell butterflies, 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 stain of blood,

A property of the living; but no stain

Can come upon the visage of the moon

When it has looked in glory from a cloud.