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

[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.