The Second Coming by W.B. Yates
Jul 4, 2020 17:56:07 GMT
theravenking, nutsberryfarm 🏜, and 2 more like this
Post by mikef6 on Jul 4, 2020 17:56:07 GMT
Do you get Pearls Before Swine on your local paper’s comic page? Here is today’s strip. Goat and Rat are sitting on bar stools.
Goat: Hey, Rat. Want to take a break from all that’s going on and hear some poetry from Yeats?
Rat: No. Poetry is stupid. It never makes sense and it never relates to the present-day world.
Goat, reciting: “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.”
Rat: Did he write that yesterday?
Goat: Borrow it. I won’t tell.
“The Second Coming” was written in 1920 in the wake of the War To End All Wars, the Irish Rebellion, and, even more pertinent, the 1918-19 Spanish Flu epidemic which almost killed Yeats pregnant wife.
The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats
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?
Goat: Hey, Rat. Want to take a break from all that’s going on and hear some poetry from Yeats?
Rat: No. Poetry is stupid. It never makes sense and it never relates to the present-day world.
Goat, reciting: “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.”
Rat: Did he write that yesterday?
Goat: Borrow it. I won’t tell.
“The Second Coming” was written in 1920 in the wake of the War To End All Wars, the Irish Rebellion, and, even more pertinent, the 1918-19 Spanish Flu epidemic which almost killed Yeats pregnant wife.
The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats
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?
