The Second Coming
I copied this from RWMalone’s substack. Seems pertinent to what we’re living through. If you go there there’s a recording of Malone reading Yeats’ poem:
The Second Coming
William Butler Yeats
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: somewhere in 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?
I was thinking about The Second Coming a few days ago.
When I was in Iraq during the oughts, The Second Coming was being sent around. Many of us were thinking of the shear lunacy of many aspects of what was occurring....
Those depredations seem tame compared to today
Civilization as we know it keeps circling the drain...
Every time I think: it cannot get worse; but, of course, it can -- and will.
~~~
May the Blessings and Promise of Christ's birth be with you, Mark, your wife (and her recovery), and those reading this comment, throughout the New Year.
Happy 2023, hang on tight.
Mark, I am simply amazed you posted this poem - a few comments back I mentioned it, as it is so filled with dreadful images of the mystery of Christmas - but in spite of the “bestial” imagery and how Yeats supremely conveys our desperate predicament, in both faith and politics, I extend to you and your family, as well as to all fellow commenters, the joys of Christmastide.