April is National Poetry Month! William Butler Yeats: "The Cat and the Moon"

Yeah, today it's some Yeats. Just so you know, it wasn't all Irish politics and the downfall of civilization and women/beautiful women/women who aren't beautiful anymore, which is so tragic for them because, fuck, I dunno, Yeats seems to have some serious tunnel vision with regards to women and their inner lives; I think the canon of his poetry would fail the Bechdel test. I really have a hell of a time finding Yeats poems about women that don't make me wince a little. It's a problem.

But look! A KITTY!


The Cat and the Moon

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 up at the moon,
For, 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.
Do 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,
A new dance turn.
Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
From moonlit place to place,
The sacred moon overhead
Has taken a new phase.
Does 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
Alone, important and wise,
And lifts to the changing moon
His changing eyes.


I dig Minnaloushe, but I dig Kipling's seal poetry even more. I mean, c'mon:

You mustn't swim till you're six weeks old,
Or your head will be sunk by your heels;
And summer gales and Killer Whales
Are bad for baby seals.

That's badass. It's up there with Robert Burns' poems about his dead pet sheep.