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W B Yeats – from Selected Poetry
from The Phases of the Moon

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 toward 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 a worm.
The thirteenth moon just 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