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''Blood and the Moon'' is a poem by Irish poet William Butler Yeats written in 1928 and published in the collection ''The Winding Stair'' in 1929 before being reprinted in The Winding Stair and Other Poems in 1933. Yeats composed the poem in response to the 1927 assassination of Kevin O'Higgins, the Vice-President of the Free State, whom Yeats had known personally. The poem contains many themes common in Yeats's poems from the 1920s including the "tower", a reference to ''Thoor Ballylee'', which had been the title of a collection of works printed the year before "Blood and the Moon" was published, as well as the "gyre" which had been a major focus of his 1920 poem "The Second Coming". ==Background== The murder of Kevin O'Higgins acted as a catalyst for Yeats's creation of the poem. As Vice President and Minister of Home Affairs in the Cosgrave Government, O'Higgins had enforced the Army Emergency Powers Act and condemned seventy-seven Republican "irregulars", including author Erskine Childers and many men with whom O'Higgins had been allies during the Irish War of Independence. O'Higgins was assassinated by a Republican gunman on 10 July 1927.〔Finneran 2000 pp.392–393〕 When Yeats heard the news that O'Higgins had been murdered, he refused to eat and spent his evening walking along the streets until the sun set.〔Jeffares 1996 p.255〕 Thoor Ballylee, Yeats's poetic model for the poem's tower, was a 16th-Century Norman castle in the Barony of Kiltartan, Ireland. The building was originally called "Islandmore Castle" and "Ballylee Castle", yet Yeats changed the name when he purchased the building in 1917 for £35. Yeats believed that the word "castle" was too magnificent and used the word "Thoor" instead as it was an anglicisation of the Irish for "tower", 'túr'.〔 Yeats credits the landmark as being the inspiration for the poem's setting. At the top of the tower was a waste room, which inspired the image of the empty room discussed in lines 8-12:〔Bornstein p.28〕 :In mockery I have set :A powerful emblem up, :And sing it rhyme upon rhyme :In mockery of a time :Half dead at the top. At the time that Yeats purchased the tower, it had seventy-three stairs that are described in lines 16-18 of the poem: :I declare this tower is my symbol; I declare :This winding, gyring, spiring treadmill of a stair is my ancestral stair; :That Goldsmith and the Dean, Berkeley and Burke have travelled there. The castle consisted of four stories. On the first floor was the dining room, and the living room was found on the second. The third story contained the bedroom, and the top story contained the "Strangers' room" which and a secret room. It was also on this story that the tower's large windows opened up over the millstream below. The windows are mentioned in the poem on lines 43-46:〔Bushrui 1990 pp.70–71〕 :Upon the dusty, glittering windows cling, :And seem to cling upon the moonlit skies, :Tortoiseshell butterflies, peacock butterflies, :A couple of night-moths are on the wing. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Blood and the Moon」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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