BLOOD AND THE MOON
 
 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
 HaIf dead at the top.
 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, cen-
 tury 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 magnani-
 mity of its own desire;
 Everything that is not God consumed with intellectual
 fire.
 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,
 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.