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 the Dean, Berkeley and Burke have travelled there. // Swift beating on his breast in sibylline 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, peacock butterflies, / A couple of night-moths are on the wing. / Is every modem 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.