poetry lamenting war #20

[truepenny]

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: 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?

--William Butler Yeats, Michael Robartes and the Dancer, 1921. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats: Definitive Edition, with the Author's Final Revisions. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1956

LINKS:
Okay, I don't know WHY the Academy of American Poets has a Yeats page, but they do.

The Yeats Society Sligo seems quite self-explanatory.

The Nobel Prize Internet Archive has a Yeats page. Likewise the Nobel e-Museum.

Theatrehistory.com provides a page focusing on Yeats's importance to, what else?, theatre history.

NOTE:
This is going to be the last daily "poetry lamenting war" post. There may be others from time to time.

Comments

[penmage.livejournal.com]

This is one of my favorite poems.

And in general, thanks for this "poetry lamenting war" series. They've all been interesting and thought-provoking.

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

I've enjoyed your series.

I plan to continue with mine.

I don't know quite how long for: I don't think this war in Iraq is going to have a definite end.

Yeats

[scarcrest.livejournal.com]

That's a good one to end the daily ones -- that's the one that's crossed my mind multiple times the past few weeks. I'm glad you've been posting these, as I've come across some poets I'd never encountered before.

Maybe we can throw the bums out in 2004. Kerry was right about the need for regime change at home, after all.