Blood and the Moon is a poem by Irish

Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland is one of the four countries of the United Kingdom. Situated in the north-east of the island of Ireland, it shares a border with the Republic of Ireland to the south and west...

 poet William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and playwright, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms...

 written in 1928 and published in the collection The Winding Stair in 1929 and reprinted in The Winding Stair and Other Poems

The Winding Stair and Other Poems

The Winding Stair is a volume of poems by Irish poet William Butler Yeats, published in 1933. It was the next new volume after 1928's The Tower...

 in 1933. Yeats composed the poem in response to the 1927 assassination of Kevin O'Higgins

Kevin O'Higgins

Kevin Christopher O'Higgins was an Irish politician who served as Vice-President of the Executive Council and Minister for Justice. He was part of early nationalist Sinn Féin, before going on to become a prominent member of Cumann na nGaedheal. O'Higgins initiated the An Garda Síochána police force...

, the Vice-President of the Free State

Irish Free State

The Irish Free State was the state established as a Dominion on 6 December 1922 under the Anglo-Irish Treaty, signed by the British government and Irish representatives exactly twelve months beforehand...

, whom Yeats had known personally. The poem contains many themes common in Yeats's poems from the 1920s including the "tower", a reference to Thoor Ballylee, which had been the title of a collection of works printed the year before "Blood and the Moon" was published, as well as the "gyre

Vortex

A vortex is a spinning, often turbulent,flow of fluid. Any spiral motion with closed streamlines is vortex flow. The motion of the fluid swirling rapidly around a center is called a vortex...

" which had been a major focus of his 1920 poem "The Second Coming

The Second Coming (poem)

"The Second Coming" is a poem composed by Irish poet William Butler Yeats in 1919 and first printed in The Dial and afterwards included in his 1921 collection of verses titled Michael Robartes and the Dancer. The poem uses Christian imagery regarding the Apocalypse and second coming as allegory to...

".

Background

The murder of Kevin O'Higgins acted as a catalyst for Yeats's creation of the poem. As Vice President and Minister of Home Affairs in the Cosgrave Government, O'Higgins had enforced the Army Emergency Powers Act and condemned seventy-seven Republican "irregulars", including author Erskine Childers

Robert Erskine Childers

Robert Erskine Childers DSC , universally known as Erskine Childers, was the author of the influential novel Riddle of the Sands and an Irish nationalist who smuggled guns to Ireland in his sailing yacht Asgard. He was executed by the authorities of the nascent Irish Free State during the Irish...

 and many men with whom O'Higgins had been allies during the Irish Civil War

Irish Civil War

The Irish Civil War was a conflict that accompanied the establishment of the Irish Free State as an entity independent from the United Kingdom within the British Empire....

. O'Higgins was assassinated by a Republican gunman on 10 July 1927. When Yeats heard the news that O'Higgins had been murdered, he refused to eat and spent his evening walking along the streets until the sun set.

Thoor Ballylee

Thoor Ballylee

Thoor Ballylee Castle, a fortified, 13th century, Norman tower built by the septs de Burgo, or Burke, lies in County Galway near the town of Gort located off the Galway-Ennis road. With four floors, the tower consists of one room on each floor that is connected by a spiral stone stairway built into...

, Yeats's poetic model for the poem's tower, was a 16th-Century Norman

Normans

The Normans were the people who gave their name to Normandy, a region in northern France. They were descended from Norse Viking conquerors of the territory and the native population of Frankish and Gallo-Roman stock...

 castle in the Barony of Kiltartan

Kiltartan

Kiltartan is a barony in County Galway, Ireland. It was formerly known as Cenél Áeda na hEchtge. It was the home of Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn, and a regular residence of W.B. Yeats.It is alluded to in Yeats's poem An Irish Airman Foresees His Death....

, Ireland. The building was originally called "Islandmore Castle" and "Ballylee Castle", yet Yeats changed the name when he purchased the building in 1917 for £35. Yeats believed that the word "castle" was too magnificent and used the word "Thoor" instead as it was Gaelic for "tower". Yeats credits the landmark as being the inspiration for the poem's setting. At the top of the tower was a waste room, which inspired the image of the empty room discussed in lines 8-12:

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.

At the time that Yeats purchased the tower, it had seventy-three stairs that are described in lines 16-18 of the poem:

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.

The castle consisted of four stories. On the first floor was the dining room, and the living room was found on the second. The third story contained the bedroom, and the top story contained the "Strangers' room" which and a secret room. It was also on this story that the tower's large windows opened up over the millstream below. The windows are mentioned in the poem on lines 43-46:

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.

Structure

The poem is arranged in four stanza

Stanza

In poetry, a stanza is a unit within a larger poem. In modern poetry, the term is often equivalent with strophe; in popular vocal music, a stanza is typically referred to as a "verse"...

s that lack symmetry and vary in size and structure. The first stanza contains three quatrains with a rhyme scheme

Rhyme scheme

A rhyme scheme is the pattern of rhyme between lines of a poem or song. It is usually referred to by using letters to indicate which lines rhyme. In other words, it is the pattern of end rhymes or lines...

 of abba which contain no breaks between the lines. The second stanza contains 18 lines of text with six long-lined tercet

Tercet

A tercet is composed of three lines of poetry, forming a stanza or a complete poem. English-language haiku is an example of an unrhymed tercet poem...

s using a rhyme scheme of aaa , which causes it to appear very different on the page from the stanzas that precede and follow it. The third stanza is a douzain, a square block of twelve lines of verse composed of pentameter

Iambic pentameter

Iambic pentameter is a commonly used metrical line in traditional verse and verse drama. The term describes the particular rhythm that the words establish in that line. That rhythm is measured in small groups of syllables; these small groups of syllables are called "feet"...

 quatrains with a rhyme scheme of abba. The fourth and final stanza repeats the structure of the one that precedes it.

Yeats explained the structure by suggesting that the poem is arranged on the page to visually represent the images described in the text. The first stanza represents the tower introduced in line 2. He claims to have composed these lines so that they would look long and slender on the page to achieve the outline of the tower's structure. The second stanza represents the "winding, gyring, spiring treadmill of a stair" mentioned in line 17, which would account for the fact that the stanza lacks symmetry among its lines, which appear to extend to various lengths across the page in a way not seen in the other stanzas. Stanzas three and four, identical in form and appearance on the page, represent two ways of looking at the tower windows. Stanza three represents the windows "glittering" from the light of the moon passing through the glass, and stanza four represents the "dusty" inside surface upon which the trapped butterflies cling.

Themes

According to literary critic Northrop Frye

Northrop Frye

Herman Northrop Frye, was a Canadian literary critic and literary theorist, considered one of the most influential of the 20th century....

, "Blood and the Moon" attempts to portray the achievements of a civilization using allegory

Allegory

Allegory is a demonstrative form of representation explaining meaning other than the words that are spoken. Allegory communicates its message by means of symbolic figures, actions or symbolic representation...

, describing the top of the tower that society builds as being an area of death and decay. In the poem, the butterflies that reach the top of the tower are unable to escape through the window and are littered around the room. The second stanza is devoted to describing other methods that poets had used to try to explain the attempt of artists to build their own towers to elevate civilization through poetry only to find, Jonathan Swift

Jonathan Swift

Jonathan Swift was an Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer , poet and cleric who became Dean of St...

 in particular, themselves dragged "down into mankind".

The contrasting elements of the blood described in line 3 and the "purity" of the unclouded moon in line 30 represents a major theme of the work. The moon's surface appears unchanging and contrasts with the earth that has been stained with the blood of men as the result of "arrogant power". As the poem speaks of the pristine nature of the moon's surface in the third stanza Helen Vendler

Helen Vendler

Helen Hennessy Vendler is a leading American critic of poetry.-Life and career:Vendler has written books on Emily Dickinson, W. B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, John Keats, and Seamus Heaney. She has been a professor of English at Harvard University since 1984; between 1981 and 1984 she taught...

 suggests that it broadens the contrast between the two surfaces to highlight the difference between "the mortal and the incorruptible". However, she also states that the poem's theme of life and death shifts focus in the final stanza as the poet discusses the trapped butterflies, which "brings into view the pathos of life, rather than its violence".

Critical response

In his book Yeats, critic Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom is an American writer and literary critic, and is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. He is known for his defense of 19th-century Romantic poets, his unique and controversial theories of poetic influence, and his prodigious literary output, particularly for a literary...

describes the poem as being splendid, though theatrical, suggesting that the second stanza is the only part of the poem that fails to achieve its objective, calling it a "pseudo-Swiftian rant". Vendler also comments on the stanza, suggesting that the fact that it is the only one to have breaks between the lines as well as the incongruity of its form in relation to the others. Bloom, however, uses the problem with the second stanza to show that the poem has flaws that do not exist in other works Yeats wrote in the same period, suggesting that while the poem is "honest", the "strength is not there".