Craig Space: Poetry: William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming"
The Second Coming
By William Butler Yeats
Yeats was definitely a strange man. But brilliant. He was yet another from that great fountain of English literature, the subject nation of Ireland. If you can't beat them and they want to destroy your beautiful language, take over their literature and do them one better.
O.K., so yeats was somewhat maudlin and could be cryptic at the best of times, but his work is unparalleled. Its mystical roots are compelling. The imagery he calls up grips your soul.
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?
Poetry
Craig Space
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