The Phases Of The Moon - Analysis

A bridge at night: two old men listening for meaning

The poem begins as a little scene of tired travel: An old man cocked his ear on a bridge, with hoots soiled and Connemara cloth worn. That plain weariness matters, because Yeats immediately sets it against a larger, almost grandiose hunger for pattern. Aherne hears a Sound; Robartes explains it away as a rat or water-hen—and then pivots to something much stranger: a tower, a reader, a candle, a life built around the hope that study can yield wisdom. From the first page, the poem’s central claim is in tension: human beings want a system that explains a whole life, but the very act of system-making can become its own kind of loneliness and error.

The candle-lit tower: scholarship as a beautiful trap

Robartes describes the man in the tower with a mix of admiration and contempt. The light in the window proves he is reading still, and the speaker links that candle to a lineage of artists and thinkers: Milton’s Platonist, Shelley’s visionary prince, the lonely light Samuel Palmer engraved. Those names aren’t just decoration; they frame the tower-dweller as someone who lives among inherited images of wisdom—romantic night-study, solitary illumination—rather than wisdom itself. Robartes’s verdict is brutal: the man has found… Mere images and now searches in book or manuscript / What he shall never find. This is the poem’s first hard contradiction: the very tradition that teaches you to desire truth also teaches you how to aestheticize your desire, so that the search becomes an artwork of yearning.

Robartes’s chosen death: refusing the story others tell

The dialogue suddenly turns personal. Robartes says the tower-man wrote of me and even declared him dead, and Robartes adds: dead I choose to be. That line gives the poem a psychological edge: the speakers aren’t neutral philosophers; they are entangled with the man they’re watching, and with the stories he has told about them. Choosing to be “dead” is a way of stepping out of someone else’s narrative, but it’s also an admission that their whole conversation—this secret singing of the moon’s phases on a bridge—may be another kind of hiding. The tone here is clipped, wounded, and proud; it’s the first time the poem suggests that the system of the moon isn’t only metaphysics, but also a strategy for managing shame, rivalry, or grief.

The hinge: no human life at the full or the dark

When Robartes begins the moon-song, the poem makes its main turn: it stops being a scene and becomes a cosmology. The rule is startlingly absolute: Twenty-and-eight the phases, but there’s no human life at the full or the dark. In this scheme, ordinary humanity lives in the crescents—between extremes. Before the half moon, life is easy and instinctive: the man is happy like a bird or a beast. As the moon rounds toward full, aspiration intensifies into self-wounding discipline: he chooses whatever whim’s most difficult, his psyche like a cat-o’-nine-tails of the mind. The poem’s hinge is that growth is both refinement and damage: the self becomes comelier precisely by being scarred.

Hero, worm, labyrinth: the cost of nearing perfection

Robartes’s examples are deliberately extreme: Athene takes Achilles by the hair, Hector is in the dust, Nietzsche is born. Heroism, slaughter, and philosophy appear as milestones on one arc of becoming. Yet the poem refuses to romanticize the approach to fullness. The “hero’s crescent” is followed by an image of helplessness: the self must be twice born, twice buried and grow helpless as a worm before full. At the thirteenth and fourteenth phases the struggle turns inward: the soul is at war / In its own being and then begins to die into the labyrinth of itself. This is one of Yeats’s sharpest tensions: the nearer the self comes to “perfection,” the less it can act, move, or participate. The mind gains intensity, but the arm has no muscle.

Full moon exile: All thought becomes an image

At full moon, the poem makes a paradoxical claim about embodiment: All thought becomes an image and the soul / Becomes a body. The culmination of discipline is not disembodied spirit; it is a kind of sealed, self-sufficient form—Body and soul so perfect they are Too lonely for the traffic of the world. The reward is exile: cast out and cast away / Beyond the visible world. Aherne’s response—All dreams… End in a beautiful… body—sounds like a celebration, but the surrounding lines darken it. Beauty is tied to suffering and violence: lovers get their long fingers from death, from wounds, from some bloody whip. Even the eyes of these perfected creatures carry terror, as if they remember or foresee the hour / When all is fed with light and heaven is bare. In other words, the fullest light is also a kind of stripping: illumination that removes shelter.

After the full: service, drudgery, and the mercy of deformity

Then comes the second big turn: the crumbling of the moon. Where the first half sought difficulty for the sake of inner refinement, the waning phases turn outward and social: the soul, remembering loneliness, decides It would be the world’s servant. Yet even service is framed as a compulsion toward the hard task—whatever task’s most difficult—and it brings coarseness, the degradation of becoming a drudge. Aherne sums it up with blunt clarity: Before the full / It sought itself and afterwards the world. Robartes lists roles—Reformer, merchant, statesman, Dutiful husband, honest wife—as if society is a carousel of cradles. The astonishing claim is that this deformation is protective: there is no deformity / But saves us from a dream. The poem implies that ordinary compromise, even ugliness, may be what keeps us from the inhuman absolutes of pure contemplation.

Dark moon and last crescents: bats, dough, and three final masks

If full moon perfection is exile in light, dark moon emptiness is exile in unformedness. The all-dark are in a cloud, crying… like the bats; lacking desire, they cannot tell good or bad. Robartes’s metaphor is almost grotesquely domestic: they are Insipid as the dough before baking, kneaded until they can take what form cook Nature fancies. Identity becomes pliable, almost meaningless: They change their bodies at a word. Yet the poem refuses to end in blankness. Aherne insists on the escape, and Robartes offers the final triad—Hunchback and Saint and Fool—as the last crescents, poised between Deformity of body and of mind. These figures suggest a different kind of release: not perfection, not vacancy, but a lived, humanized limitation—holiness, humor, crookedness—standing at the edge of the system.

A cruel joke, and the extinguished light

The poem returns to the bridge and ends on laughter. Aherne imagines himself staggering to the tower door and muttering Hunchback and Saint and Fool so the scholar will crack his wits forever. What seemed hard becomes so simple: the moon-system can be reduced to a taunt. In the final gestures—a bat rising from hazels with a squeaky cry, and The light in the tower window being put out—Yeats closes the loop between cosmic theory and small night-life. The candle that promised mysterious wisdom goes dark; the bat, earlier a figure for the all-dark, now flits through the immediate world. The ending leaves a troubling aftertaste: the men can map every phase, but the tower-man’s labor continues (or ends) regardless, and the universe doesn’t confirm which of them is wise.

The poem’s dare: is wisdom just another phase?

If the tower scholar will never find what he seeks, why do Robartes and Aherne need to sing this system at all—why keep returning to cradle upon cradle, to the full’s lonely perfection, to the bats and the dough? The poem seems to imply that even the clearest map is still an image, and that the deepest trap may be mistaking a beautiful pattern for an answer to the raw fact of being alive, tired, and walking in the dark.