"Oil and Blood," Yeats

[switchercat.livejournal.com]

More Yeats. Posting this one because it's very short and bizarre and seems little-known. I'm finding that Yeats used the word "blood" all the time, in lots of poems, and "beast" too, and there seems to be a symbolic link there from which I want to puzzle out some meaning.

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In tombs of gold and lapis lazuli
Bodies of holy men and women exude
Miraculous oil, odour of violet.
But under heavy loads of trampled clay
Lie bodies of the vampires full of blood;
Their shrouds are bloody and their lips are wet.

Comments

[duathir.livejournal.com]

Yeats was an initiate of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (http://www.yeatsvision.com/GD.html) , in which 'blood' and 'beast' are symbolically linked within a vast, tangled web of lore. The Hermetic traditions make sense only within their own context, if they can be considered to make sense at all.