Ideas of Good and EvilYeats, W. B. (William Butler)
Philosophy
Ideas of Good and Evil
Yeats, W. B. (William Butler)
Essays
It may have been this memory, or it may have been some impulse of his
nature too subtle for his mind to follow, that made Keats, with his love
of embodied things, of precision of form and colouring, of emotions made
sleepy by the flesh, see Intellectual Beauty in the Moon; and Blake, who
lived in that energy he called eternal delight, see it in the Sun, where
his personification of poetic genius labours at a furnace. I think there
was certainly some reason why these men took so deep a pleasure in lights,
that Shelley thought of with weariness and trouble. The Moon is the most
changeable of symbols, and not merely because it is the symbol of change.
As mistress of the waters she governs the life of instinct and the
generation of things, for as Porphyry says, even 'the apparition of
images' in the 'imagination' is through 'an excess of moisture'; and, as a
cold and changeable fire set in the bare heavens, she governs alike
chastity and the joyless idle drifting hither and thither of generated
things. She may give God a body and have Gabriel to bear her messages, or
she may come to men in their happy moments as she came to Endymion, or she
may deny life and shoot her arrows; but because she only becomes beautiful
in giving herself, and is no flying ideal, she is not loved by the
children of desire.
Shelley could not help but see her with unfriendly eyes. He is believed to
have described Mary Shelley at a time when she had come to seem cold in
his eyes, in that passage of _Epipsychidion_ which tells how a woman like
the Moon led him to her cave and made 'frost' creep over the sea of his
mind, and so bewitched life and death with 'her silver voice' that they
ran from him crying, 'Away, he is not of our crew.' When he describes the
Moon as part of some beautiful scene he can call her beautiful, but when
he personifies, when his words come under the influence of that great
memory or of some mysterious tide in the depth of our being, he grows
unfriendly or not truly friendly or at the most pitiful. The Moon's lips
'are pale and waning,' it is 'the cold Moon,' or 'the frozen and
inconstant Moon,' or it is 'forgotten' and 'waning,' or it 'wanders' and
is 'weary,' or it is 'pale and grey,' or it is 'pale for weariness,' and
'wandering companionless' and 'ever changing,' and finding 'no object
worth' its 'constancy,' or it is like a 'dying lady' who 'totters' 'out of
her chamber led by the insane and feeble wanderings of her fading brain,'
and even when it is no more than a star, it casts an evil influence that
makes the lips of lovers 'lurid' or pale. It only becomes a thing of
delight when Time is being borne to his tomb in eternity, for then the
spirit of the Earth, man's procreant mind, fills it with his own
joyousness. He describes the spirit of the Earth and of the Moon, moving
above the rivulet of their lives in a passage which reads like a
half-understood vision. Man has become 'one harmonious soul of many a
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