THE SECOND COMING
by: W. B. Yeats (1865-1939)
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 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?
Back in October of last year, I sent that poem to many friends and acquaintances as a commentary on the upcoming election.
I may had even posted it a time or two on FR.
In general I was told (except by my good FRiend Salamander - gifted with Second Sight) that I was reading too much in things, that I was paranoid etc. You know the drill, I’m sure.
Time is telling the tale.
The Yeats poem is, if anything, an understatement.
Truly, one of the greatest poems ever written, by the great non-denominational mystic, William Butler Yeats.
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