When I was little I had difficulty learning to read, partly because of left/right handed confusion, partly because I had a teacher from hell who used to pull my plaits when I made a mistake and maybe because it was around that very time my father died and upset the whole applecart. However it may be, all through junior school that part of the day when you went up and chose a book and read silently was a torture for me. But it led me to poetry. Poetry was short enough you could just dip in. Poetry had rhythms and rhymes that helped with difficult words (though I remember consistently reading 'phase’ as 'face’ in this poem.) Poetry painted pictures in my head that replaced all those confusing symbols with sounds and you could make up your own stories round it.
Recently I decided to repair an appalling gap in my reading and picked up a collection of Yeats’ work in a second hand book shop. We’d 'done’ a few poems by Yeats at school but not many. However I wasn’t far into it before I recognised an old friend and I sat grinning with the book in my hand and remembered reading this one poem again and again (until the teacher spotted that I’d been in the same book for months that is) and the sheer delight of it because I loved cats and the moon and could see Minnaloushe pouncing about in moonlit pools
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 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.
by W B YEATS
And I remember thinking at the time that though the cat loved the bright moon and the moon shone down on the antics of the black cat, they could never really meet and understand each other. She is beautiful sacred and pure and very far above him and he will never be interested in dancing but only in hunting. Though they meet in the night, they really don’t understand each other’s natures or their own. It’s only the night they have in common, only the night that connects the two. They are both changeable and proud in their own way but they cannot accommodate each other.
Of course there is a lot more to the poem than that. A child can read it but it’s far from a children’s poem. Study it for yourself. The rhymes tend toward assonance and the rhythm inevitably breaks down. It’s a dance that cannot be. I knew not thing about Maud Gonne or Yeats himself or the moon’s 28 day cycle or much at all about anything (I think I was about ten). But that expression of solitude gave voice to something I sensed but didn’t understand, just as they didn’t understand; the nature of connectivity and individuality; the need to be alone commingled with the desperate longing to belong. The picture always remained in my head even though I didn’t know who’d written the poem. A great story of love and loss. And a good deal shorter than Anna Karenina!