poetry lamenting war #20
Apr. 8th, 2003 07:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyTHE 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.
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.
