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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=537259" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>The Phases Of The Moon</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">An old man cocked his car upon a bridge;<br>He and his friend, their faces to the South,<br>Had trod the uneven road. Their hoots were soiled,<br>Their Connemara cloth worn out of shape;<br>They had kept a steady pace as though their beds,<br>Despite a dwindling and late-risen moon,<br>Were distant still. An old man cocked his ear.<br>Aherne. What made that Sound?<br>Robartes. A rat or water-hen<br>Splashed, or an otter slid into the stream.<br>We are on the bridge; that shadow is the tower,<br>And the light proves that he is reading still.<br>He has found, after the manner of his kind,<br>Mere images; chosen this place to live in<br>Because, it may be, of the candle-light<br>From the far tower where Milton's Platonist<br>Sat late, or Shelley's visionary prince:<br>The lonely light that Samuel Palmer engraved,<br>An image of mysterious wisdom won by toil;<br>And now he seeks in book or manuscript<br>What he shall never find.<br>Ahernc. Why should not you<br>Who know it all ring at his door, and speak<br>Just truth enough to show that his whole life<br>Will scarcely find for him a broken crust<br>Of all those truths that are your daily bread;<br>And when you have spoken take the roads again?<br>Robartes. He wrote of me in that extravagant style<br>He had learnt from pater, and to round his tale<br>Said I was dead; and dead I choose to be.<br>Aherne. Sing me the changes of the moon once more;<br>True song, though speech: 'mine author sung it me.'<br>Robartes. Twenty-and-eight the phases of the moon,<br>The full and the moon's dark and all the crescents,<br>Twenty-and-eight, and yet but six-and-twenty<br>The cradles that a man must needs be rocked in:<br>For there's no human life at the full or the dark.<br>From the first crescent to the half, the dream<br>But summons to adventure and the man<br>Is always happy like a bird or a beast;<br>But while the moon is rounding towards the full<br>He follows whatever whim's most difficult<br>Among whims not impossible, and though scarred.<br>As with the cat-o'-nine-tails of the mind,<br>His body moulded from within his body<br>Grows comelier. Eleven pass, and then<br>Athene takes Achilles by the hair,<br>Hector is in the dust, Nietzsche is born,<br>Because the hero's crescent is the twelfth.<br>And yet, twice born, twice buried, grow he must,<br>Before the full moon, helpless as a worm.<br>The thirteenth moon but sets the soul at war<br>In its own being, and when that war's begun<br>There is no muscle in the arm; and after,<br>Under the frenzy of the fourteenth moon,<br>The soul begins to tremble into stillness,<br>To die into the labyrinth of itself!<br>Aherne. Sing out the song; sing to the end, and sing<br>The strange reward of all that discipline.<br>Robartes. All thought becomes an image and the soul<br>Becomes a body: that body and that soul<br>Too perfect at the full to lie in a cradle,<br>Too lonely for the traffic of the world:<br>Body and soul cast out and cast away<br>Beyond the visible world.<br>Aherne. All dreams of the soul<br>End in a beautiful man's or woman's body.<br>Robartes, Have you not always known it?<br>Aherne. The song will have it<br>That those that we have loved got their long fingers<br>From death, and wounds, or on Sinai's top,<br>Or from some bloody whip in their own hands.<br>They ran from cradle to cradle till at last<br>Their beauty dropped out of the loneliness<br>Of body and soul.<br>Robartes. The lover's heart knows that.<br>Aherne. It must be that the terror in their eyes<br>Is memory or foreknowledge of the hour<br>When all is fed with light and heaven is bare.<br>Robartes. When the moon's full those creatures of the full<br>Are met on the waste hills by countrymen<br>Who shudder and hurry by: body and soul<br>Estranged amid the strangeness of themselves,<br>Caught up in contemplation, the mind's eye<br>Fixed upon images that once were thought;<br>For separate, perfect, and immovable<br>Images can break the solitude<br>Of lovely, satisfied, indifferent eyes.<br>And thereupon with aged, high-pitched voice<br>Aherne laughed, thinking of the man within,<br>His sleepless candle and lahorious pen.<br>Robartes. And after that the crumbling of the moon.<br>The soul remembering its loneliness<br>Shudders in many cradles; all is changed,<br>It would be the world's servant, and as it serves,<br>Choosing whatever task's most difficult<br>Among tasks not impossible, it takes<br>Upon the body and upon the soul<br>The coarseness of the drudge.<br>Aherne. Before the full<br>It sought itself and afterwards the world.<br>Robartes. Because you are forgotten, half out of life,<br>And never wrote a book, your thought is clear.<br>Reformer, merchant, statesman, learned man,<br>Dutiful husband, honest wife by turn,<br>Cradle upon cradle, and all in flight and all<br>Deformed because there is no deformity<br>But saves us from a dream.<br>Aherne. And what of those<br>That the last servile crescent has set free?<br>Robartes. Because all dark, like those that are all light,<br>They are cast beyond the verge, and in a cloud,<br>Crying to one another like the bats;<br>And having no desire they cannot tell<br>What's good or bad, or what it is to triumph<br>At the perfection of one's own obedience;<br>And yet they speak what's blown into the mind;<br>Deformed beyond deformity, unformed,<br>Insipid as the dough before it is baked,<br>They change their bodies at a word.<br>Aherne. And then?<br>Rohartes. When all the dough has been so kneaded up<br>That it can take what form cook Nature fancies,<br>The first thin crescent is wheeled round once more.<br>Aherne. But the escape; the song's not finished yet.<br>Robartes. Hunchback and Saint and Fool are the last crescents.<br>The burning bow that once could shoot an arrow<br>Out of the up and down, the wagon-wheel<br>Of beauty's cruelty and wisdom's chatter --<br>Out of that raving tide -- is drawn betwixt<br>Deformity of body and of mind.<br>Aherne. Were not our beds far off I'd ring the bell,<br>Stand under the rough roof-timbers of the hall<br>Beside the castle door, where all is stark<br>Austerity, a place set out for wisdom<br>That he will never find; I'd play a part;<br>He would never know me after all these years<br>But take me for some drunken countryman:<br>I'd stand and mutter there until he caught<br>'Hunchback and Sant and Fool,' and that they came<br>Under the three last crescents of the moon.<br>And then I'd stagger out. He'd crack his wits<br>Day after day, yet never find the meaning.<br>And then he laughed to think that what seemed hard<br>Should be so simple -- a bat rose from the hazels<br>And circled round him with its squeaky cry,<br>The light in the tower window was put out.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=William+Butler+Yeats">William Butler Yeats</a><div class=q>
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<script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=537259" data-title="The Phases Of The Moon de William Butler Yeats" data-description="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..."></div>
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