The Phases Of The Moon
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 and late-risen moon,
Were distant still. An old man cocked his ear.
Aherne. What made that Sound?
Robartes. A rat or water-hen
Splashed, or an otter slid into the stream.
We are on the bridge; that shadow is the tower,
And the light proves that he is reading still.
He has found, after the manner of his kind,
Mere images; chosen this place to live in
Because, it may be, of the candle-light
From the far tower where Milton's Platonist
Sat late, or Shelley's visionary prince:
The lonely light that Samuel Palmer engraved,
An image of mysterious wisdom won by toil;
And now he seeks in book or manuscript
What he shall never find.
Ahernc. Why should not you
Who know it all ring at his door, and speak
Just truth enough to show that his whole life
Will scarcely find for him a broken crust
Of all those truths that are your daily bread;
And when you have spoken take the roads again?
Robartes. He wrote of me in that extravagant style
He had learnt from pater, and to round his tale
Said I was dead; and dead I choose to be.
Aherne. Sing me the changes of the moon once more;
True song, though speech: "mine author sung it me.'
Robartes. Twenty-and-eight the phases of the moon,
The full and the moon's dark and all the crescents,
Twenty-and-eight, and yet but six-and-twenty
The cradles that a man must needs be rocked in:
For there's no human life at the full or the dark.
From the first crescent to the half, the dream
But summons to adventure and the man
Is always happy like a bird or a beast;
But while the moon is rounding towards the full
He follows whatever whim's most difficult
Among whims not impossible, and though scarred.
As with the cat-o'-nine-tails of the mind,
His body moulded from within his body
Grows comelier. Eleven pass, and then
Athene takes Achilles by the hair,
Hector is in the dust, Nietzsche is born,
Because the hero's crescent is the twelfth.
And yet, twice born, twice buried, grow he must,
Before the full moon, helpless as a worm.
The thirteenth moon but sets the soul at war
In its own being, and when that war's begun
There is no muscle in the arm; and after,
Under the frenzy of the fourteenth moon,
The soul begins to tremble into stillness,
To die into the labyrinth of itself!
Aherne. Sing out the song; sing to the end, and sing
The strange reward of all that discipline.
Robartes. All thought becomes an image and the soul
Becomes a body: that body and that soul
Too perfect at the full to lie in a cradle,
Too lonely for the traffic of the world:
Body and soul cast out and cast away
Beyond the visible world.
Aherne. All dreams of the soul
End in a beautiful man's or woman's body.
Robartes, Have you not always known it?
Aherne. The song will have it
That those that we have loved got their long fingers
From death, and wounds, or on Sinai's top,
Or from some bloody whip in their own hands.
They ran from cradle to cradle till at last
Their beauty dropped out of the loneliness
Of body and soul.
Robartes. The lover's heart knows that.
Aherne. It must be that the terror in their eyes
Is memory or foreknowledge of the hour
When all is fed with light and heaven is bare.
Robartes. When the moon's full those creatures of the
full
Are met on the waste hills by countrymen
Who shudder and hurry by: body and soul
Estranged amid the strangeness of themselves,
Caught up in contemplation, the mind's eye
Fixed upon images that once were thought;
For separate, perfect, and immovable
Images can break the solitude
Of lovely, satisfied, indifferent eyes.
And thereupon with aged, high-pitched voice
Aherne laughed, thinking of the man within,
His sleepless candle and lahorious pen.
Robartes. And after that the crumbling of the moon.
The soul remembering its loneliness
Shudders in many cradles; all is changed,
It would be the world's servant, and as it serves,
Choosing whatever task's most difficult
Among tasks not impossible, it takes
Upon the body and upon the soul
The coarseness of the drudge.
Aherne. Before the full
It sought itself and afterwards the world.
Robartes. Because you are forgotten, half out of life,
And never wrote a book, your thought is clear.
Reformer, merchant, statesman, learned man,
Dutiful husband, honest wife by turn,
Cradle upon cradle, and all in flight and all
Deformed because there is no deformity
But saves us from a dream.
Aherne. And what of those
That the last servile crescent has set free?
Robartes. Because all dark, like those that are all light,
They are cast beyond the verge, and in a cloud,
Crying to one another like the bats;
And having no desire they cannot tell
What's good or bad, or what it is to triumph
At the perfection of one's own obedience;
And yet they speak what's blown into the mind;
Deformed beyond deformity, unformed,
Insipid as the dough before it is baked,
They change their bodies at a word.
Aherne. And then?
Rohartes. When all the dough has been so kneaded up
That it can take what form cook Nature fancies,
The first thin crescent is wheeled round once more.
Aherne. But the escape; the song's not finished yet.
Robartes. Hunchback and Saint and Fool are the last
crescents.
The burning bow that once could shoot an arrow
Out of the up and down, the wagon-wheel
Of beauty's cruelty and wisdom's chatter -
Out of that raving tide - is drawn betwixt
Deformity of body and of mind.
Aherne. Were not our beds far off I'd ring the bell,
Stand under the rough roof-timbers of the hall
Beside the castle door, where all is stark
Austerity, a place set out for wisdom
That he will never find; I'd play a part;
He would never know me after all these years
But take me for some drunken countryman:
I'd stand and mutter there until he caught
"Hunchback and Sant and Fool,' and that they came
Under the three last crescents of the moon.
And then I'd stagger out. He'd crack his wits
Day after day, yet never find the meaning.
And then he laughed to think that what seemed hard
Should be so simple - a bat rose from the hazels
And circled round him with its squeaky cry,
The light in the tower window was put out.
Literary Analysis
This literary analysis was generated with AI and may contain interpretive differences. Provide your analysis in the comments section.
Summary
William Butler Yeats stages a nocturnal conversation between Aherne and Robartes on a bridge, with a distant tower light and a scholar reading by candlelight in the background. The immediate scene feels almost theatrical: two weathered men pause on the road and turn from the physical world into speculation, teasing out a theory of human life through the moon's changing phases. Their talk ranges from solitary scholarship to artistic vision, from heroic striving to social usefulness, and finally to those extreme states Yeats imagines as saintliness, folly, or deformity.
The poem moves in a spiral rather than a straight argument. Robartes lays out a pattern in which human beings pass through recurring stages of desire, ambition, conflict, service, and exhaustion, each phase linked to a corresponding moon phase. Aherne repeatedly presses him for meaning, but the "meaning" is not simple wisdom: it is a vision of life as cyclical, divided, and never fully at rest. The central tension lies in whether perfection is desirable at all. Yeats suggests that the soul's urge toward completion can produce beauty and greatness, yet also isolation, sterility, and estrangement from ordinary life. The poem's strange, provocative force comes from its refusal to treat any single condition as final or wholly blessed.
Theme
- Cycles of human life - The moon's repeated phases become a map for human development, suggesting that people move through recurring stages rather than a single upward progress.
- Beauty and isolation - Yeats links extraordinary beauty with loneliness and distance from ordinary experience, making perfection feel both radiant and alienating.
- Striving and discipline - The poem treats effort as necessary for growth, but that effort is shown as painful, exhausting, and often inwardly conflicted.
- Body and soul - Physical life and inner life are presented as inseparable yet often at odds, with each phase altering their relationship.
- Knowledge and imagination - The scholar in the tower represents the search for truth through books and images, but the poem questions whether intellectual pursuit can ever reach completion.
- Social usefulness versus visionary intensity - Yeats contrasts those who serve the world with those who withdraw into contemplation, leaving open whether practical life or visionary life is more fulfilling.
Literary Devices
- Allegory - The moon phases function as an extended allegory for human growth, turning a natural cycle into a symbolic philosophy of life.
- Dialogue - The exchange between Aherne and Robartes gives the poem dramatic energy and lets the ideas unfold as a living debate rather than a lecture.
- Symbolism - The moon, tower, candle, bridge, and bats all carry layered meanings that enlarge the poem beyond its immediate scene.
- Imagery - Yeats uses concrete visual images, such as the tower light and the worn clothes of the travelers, to ground abstract speculation in physical reality.
- Repetition - Repeated references to crescents, cradles, and phases reinforce the sense of pattern, return, and cyclic movement.
- Allusion - References to Milton, Shelley, Athene, Achilles, Hector, Nietzsche, Sinai, and others widen the poem's scope by placing Yeats's theory of life in conversation with literature, myth, and philosophy.
- Paradox - The poem repeatedly joins opposites, such as beauty and cruelty or perfection and loneliness, to show that development always carries contradiction.
- Extended metaphor - The moon's changing face becomes an extended metaphor for the changing forms of the soul across a lifetime.
Symbolism
- The moon - The moon symbolizes the recurring stages of life, with each phase standing for a distinct psychic condition.
- The bridge - The bridge suggests transition and suspended movement, a fitting place for a conversation about passage between states of being.
- The tower light - The distant candle in the tower may symbolize isolated intellectual labor and the longing for hidden wisdom.
- The cradles - Cradles represent the repeated human "beginnings" or stages into which a life is rocked, emphasizing dependence and renewal.
- Bats - The bats at the end suggest nocturnal uncertainty, disorientation, and beings that exist at the edge of human understanding.
Tone
Yeats's tone is intellectually daring, slightly ironic, and charged with visionary conviction. He treats the conversation like a private revelation, but the logic is never dry or academic; it has the pulse of a performance, with teasing, laughter, and sudden dark certainties. For the reader, the mood is nocturnal and uncanny, mixing the roughness of a roadside scene with the grandeur of a philosophical system. The result is both austere and enchanted: the poem feels as though ordinary life has been pulled into a strange celestial order.
Historical Context
This poem belongs to Yeats's later symbolic and philosophical writing, when he was deeply interested in systems that linked historical change, personality, and spiritual development. His work often blends modern poetic drama with occult, mythic, and cyclical ideas, creating a vision of history and the self as patterned by recurring opposites. The poem also reflects Yeats's fascination with the tower as a place of solitude, study, and cultural memory, a setting that appears often in his mature poetry.
Broadly speaking, the poem grows out of early twentieth-century modern poetry's willingness to combine lyric intensity with intellectual complexity. Yeats draws on classical allusion, Christian imagery, Romantic aspiration, and philosophical speculation at once. That mixture places the poem between tradition and modernity: it is steeped in inherited symbols, yet it uses them to build a personal theory of human development and artistic destiny.