Yeats

wbyeatsHaving just filled out my absentee ballot for the California Primary, I can’t stop thinking about this poem, especially the first stanza. This was written during the first world war, but seems so relevant today. Certainly the worst are full of passionate intensity. And the feeling of things falling apart is very present.

 

 

 

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

William Butler Years, 1919

2 thoughts on “Yeats

  1. Yes, I agree.
    Each time I read this poem it enlarges. The poet’s voice connects more exactly.
    The falcon. The falconer–it makes me feel so desperately lonely.

  2. What’s so amazing is how it seems to be about this moment in time. Is there any rougher beast around than Trump and what he represents?

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