Blood and the Moon

Lyrics

[I] Blessed be this place, More blessed still this tower; A bloody, arrogant power Rose out of 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 Death, 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 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.