The Phases of the Moon by William Butler Yeats

An old man cocked his ear upon a bridge;He and his friend, their faces to the South,Had trod the uneven road. Their boots 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. An old man cocked his ear.

AHERNE

What made that sound?

ROBARTES

A rat or water-henSplashed, 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 inBecause, it may be, of the candle lightFrom the far tower where Milton's platonistSat 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 manuscriptWhat he shall never find.

AHERNE

Why should not youWho know it all ring at his door, and speakJust truth enough to show that his whole lifeWill scarcely find for him a broken crustOf 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 styleHe had learnt from Pater, and to round his taleSaid I was dead; and dead I chose 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-twentyThe 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 dreamBut summons to adventure and the manIs always happy like a bird or a beast;But while the moon is rounding towards the fullHe follows whatever whim's most difficultAmong whims not impossible, and though scarredAs with the cat-o'-nine-tails of the mind,His body moulded from within his bodyGrows comelier. Eleven pass, and thenAthenae takes Achilles by the hair,Hector is in the dust, Nietzsche is born,Because the heroes' 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 warIn its own being, and when that war's begunThere is no muscle in the arm; and afterUnder the frenzy of the fourteenth moonThe soul begins to tremble into stillness,To die into the labyrinth of itself!

AHERNE

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

ROBARTES

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

AHERNE

All dreams of the soulEnd in a beautiful man's or woman's body.

ROBARTES

Have you not always known it?

AHERNE

The song will have itThat those that we have loved got their long fingersFrom 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 lastTheir beauty dropped out of the lonelinessOf body and soul.

ROBARTES

The lovers' heart knows that.

AHERNE

It must be that the terror in their eyesIs memory or foreknowledge of the hourWhen all is fed with light and heaven is bare.

ROBARTES

When the moon's full those creatures of the fullAre met on the waste hills by country menWho shudder and hurry by: body and soulEstranged amid the strangeness of themselves,Caught up in contemplation, the mind's eyeFixed upon images that once were thought,For separate, perfect, and immovableImages can break the solitudeOf lovely, satisfied, indifferent eyes.

And thereupon with aged, high-pitched voiceAherne 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 lonelinessShudders in many cradles; all is changed,It would be the World's servant, and as it serves,Choosing whatever task's most difficultAmong tasks not impossible, it takesUpon the body and upon the soulThe coarseness of the drudge.

AHERNE

Before the fullIt 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 allDeformed because there is no deformityBut saves us from a dream.

AHERNE

And what of thoseThat 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 tellWhat's good or bad, or what it is to triumphAt 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 upThat it can take what form cook Nature fancyThe 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 arrowOut of the up and down, the wagon wheelOf beauty's cruelty and wisdom's chatter,Out of that raving tide is drawn betwixtDeformity 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 hallBeside the castle door, where all is starkAusterity, a place set out for wisdomThat he will never find; I'd play a part;He would never know me after all these yearsBut take me for some drunken country man;I'd stand and mutter there until he caught'Hunchback and saint and fool,' and that they cameUnder the three last crescents of the moon,And then I'd stagger out. He'd crack his witsDay after day, yet never find the meaning.And then he laughed to think that what seemed hardShould be so simple⁠—a bat rose from the hazelsAnd circled round him with its squeaky cry,The light in the tower window was put out.