The Cat and the Moon

W.B. YeatsWritten 1917.Published in

‘The Wild Swans at Coole’ (1919)

THE cat went here and there And the moon spun round like a top, And the nearest kin of the moon, The creeping cat, looked up. Black Minnaloushe stared at the moon, 5For, wander and wail as he would, The pure cold light in the sky Troubled his animal blood.

Minnaloushe runs in the grass Lifting his delicate feet. 10Do you dance, Minnaloushe, do you dance?When two close kindred meet, What better than call a dance? Maybe the moon may learn, Tired of that courtly fashion, 15A new dance turn.

Minnaloushe creeps through the grass From moonlit place to place, The sacred moon overhead Has taken a new phase. 20Does Minnaloushe know that his pupils Will pass from change to change, And that from round to crescent, From crescent to round they range? Minnaloushe creeps through the grass 25Alone, important and wise, And lifts to the changing moon His changing eyes.

"I think all happiness depends on the energy to assume the mask of some other life, on a re-birth as something not one's self." WB Yeats ‘Per Amica Silentia Lunae’ (1918)

‘On the afternoon of October 24th 1917, four days after my marriage, my wife surprised me by attempting automatic writing. What came in disjointed sentences, in almost illegible writing, was so exciting, sometimes so profound, that I persuaded her to give an hour or two day after day to the unknown writer, and after some half-dozen such hours offered to spend what remained of life explaining and piecing together those scattered sentences. ‘No,’ was the answer, ‘we have come to give you metaphors for poetry.’’WB Yeats ‘Introduction to ‘A Vision’’

Yeats married in 1917. Only four days after the wedding, his bride began what would be a lengthy experiment with the psychic phenomenon called automatic writing, in which her hand and pen presumably served as unconscious instruments for the spirit world to send information.

Yeats and his wife held more than four hundred sessions of automatic writing, producing nearly four thousand pages that Yeats avidly and patiently studied and organized. From these sessions Yeats formulated theories about life and history.

He believed that certain patterns existed, the most important being what he called gyres, interpenetrating cones representing mixtures of opposites of both a personal and historical nature. He contended that gyres were initiated by the divine impregnation of a mortal woman—first, the rape of Leda by Zeus; later, the immaculate conception of Mary.

Yeats found that within each two-thousand-year era, emblematic moments occurred at the midpoints of the thousand-year halves. At these moments of balance, he believed, a civilization could achieve special excellence, and Yeats cited as examples the splendour of Athens at 500 B.C., Byzantium at A.D. 500, and the Italian Renaissance at A.D. 1500. The Poetry Foundation Website (www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/william-butler-yeats)

Yeats further likened these historical cycles to the twenty-eight day lunar cycle, contending that physical existence grows steadily until it reaches a maximum at the full moon (phase fifteen), which Yeats described as perfect beauty. In the remaining half of the cycle, physical existence gradually falls away, until it disappears completely at the new moon, whereupon the cycle begins again.

Applying this pattern both to historical eras and to individuals' lives, Yeats observed that a person completes the phases as he advances from birth to maturity and declines toward death. Yeats further elaborated the scheme by assigning particular phases to specific types of personality, so that although each person passes through phases two through fourteen and sixteen through twenty-eight during a lifetime, one phase provides an overall characterization of the individual's entire life.

Yeats published his intricate and not completely systematic theories of personality and history in A Vision (1925), and some of the symbolic patterns (gyres, moon phases) with which he organized these theories provide important background to many of the poems and plays he wrote during the second half of his career.The Poetry Foundation Website (www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/william-butler-yeats)

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-twentyThe cradles that a man must needs be rocked in:For there’s no human life at the full or the dark.WB Yeats ‘The Phases of the Moon’ (1917)

Q. How do these ideas relate or help contextualise your understanding of the poem ‘The Cat and the Moon’.

‘Some were looking for spiritual happiness or for some form of unknown power, but I had a practical object. I wished for a system of thought that would leave my imagination free to create as it chose and yet make all that it created, or could create, part of the one history and that the soul’s.WB Yeats ‘A Vision’