Since nobody reads this blog anyway, I tought I might stop writing about politics, international news and other boring stuff and just post a few notes about a poem by Yeats hat I like:
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 Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
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
Reel 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?
Now, the poem is apocalyptic in tone and pessimistic in its message, so in a sense it has not lost its power. Written in 1920, inbetween two World Wars, it seems however more apt to the times we live in.
Its theme, of course, is the decay of Western civilization. All the first stanza provides images of discontrol, loss, despair. “The falconer cannot hear the falconer”. “Things fall apart”, and of course, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” Indeed, even now the worst murderers and sonofabitches – islamic terrorists, neocommunists, murdering dictators armed with nuclear bombs – are full of passionate intensity while the best… Waver. Falter. Or are not really sure of what to do to stop the tide of insanity. Perhaps there’s nothing to do. Perhaps Yeats is right and we have reached the end of a 2000 year cicle. A beast slouces towards Bettlehem, and the world will plunge into the New Dark Age…
Sleep well, folks.
