"I'll meet you tonight under the moon. Oh, I can see you now, you and the moon. You wear a necktie so I'll know you." Groucho Marx (to Margaret Dumont) in The Coconuts

and later that same evening:

The Crazed Moon by William Butler Yeats

Crazed through much child-bearing
The moon is staggering in the sky;
Moon-struck by the despairing
Glances of her wandering eye
We grope, and grope in vain,
For children born of her pain.

Children dazed or dead!
When she in all her virginal pride
First trod on the mountain's head
What stir ran through the countryside
Where every foot obeyed her glance!
What manhood led the dance!

Fly-catchers of the moon,
Our hands are blenched, our fingers seem
But slender needles of bone;
Blenched by that malicious dream
They are spread wide that each
May rend what comes in reach.

Hey Falcon,

Yeah, "The Crazed Moon" really bears on this discussion, especially as it ties the moon to women, to pregnancy, and to the pain of childbirth (i.e., Eve's curse).

Earlier, someone was asking whether there was ever a woman in the moon. In Chinese mythology, the wife of the great archer who shot down the extra suns in the sky that were threatening to burn up all life on earth secretly drank his potion of immortality and was punished by being put in perpetual exile on the moon. The Chinese also have a rabbit in the moon and a man who is perpetually cutting down a tree with an ax on the moon.

I was fascinated by the word blenched. It seems to be an old word meaning cheated, misled.

That fellow with the axe is new to me. I wonder if the tree grows back overnight, or once a month...or if it's just there. Those perpetual tasks spring up everywhere, like dragon's heads. This one reminds me of Oisin's battle with the demon.

So in Shakespeare's day "Many writers of the time asserted women's inferiority to men. Some drew on the medieval tradition that blamed mankind's fall on Eve, and the same tradition saw the woman as a temptress, sexually insatiable once she had lost her virginity. Others thought of a woman as an incomplete man, lacking the faculty of reason and ability to control her emotions. She was controlled, like the tides, by the fickle moon, as her menstrual cycle showed. Fluidity and excess were qualities often attributed to women in literature...Yet all of this stands against the many intelligent and determined women we find in the plays of the period. And for most of Shakespeare's life the monarch was a woman." (From Shakespeare: The Basics by Sean McEvoy.)

So despite the opinion of the "many writers" the plays of the period did not depict women in the manner indicated, and, as noted, the monarch was female. Apparently I have to go to p.247. Here the writer discusses A Winter's Tale but the lunar stereotype does not appear. He also cites Sir Thomas Elyot but Elyot is saying that woman should be submissive to her husband, not that she is lunar or emotionally volatile. Sometimes women are depicted that way in Shakespeare (Katharina or Cleopatra), but often not. (What about Viola or Isabella? In fact can you say Juliet herself, despite your citation of her, really is a female moon and at the same time point out that she tells Romeo specifically not to be a moon?) McEvoy states "It is too easy, in fact, to see misogyny (hatred of women) as a single simple force running through all of the society of Shakespeare's time."

I can only suppose that these "many writers" did not get much attention even in their time. St. Augustine attributes man's fall to Adam, not Eve. See The City of God.) Although Yeats read widely I'm not sure he was so much influenced by these "many writers", who apparently had little if any influence on Shakespeare depiction of character. Again, can you show that these "traditional misogynist texts" had all that much influence on Yeats?

The real point of your interpretation is how to read the word "shell" and I agree that it certainly is a sea-shell since it is washed by time's waters." Although "labor" can be read as the labor of childbirth I don't think this means for example that Yeats is jealous of women for being able to give birth. To see the shell as female and spend time on Maud Gonne and Yeats' failure to win her hand seems to me pointless because although it tells us about Yeats personally, I don't think it helps to understand the poem.

Let me recommend Teresa Cader's recent new post, related to some of this, at the end of an earlier thread begun by Mark Turpin. She mentions misogyny in relation to the Adam story, goes from the meaning of Biblical nakedness to "speaking nakedly": <link>