The Second Coming
Why The Second Coming is, and is not, about Iraq. Turning and turning in the widening gyre
Though this poem has a few memorable phrases, it is them rather than the poem that stay in the mind. It doesn't sing; though I don't suppose in its grimness it should. It is heavy-footed and too visionary. There are too many symbols and they all seem yanked together. Quite different from the exquisite miniatures of Long-legged Fly, which is just as visionary, but set in the opposite civilisational moment, and entirely successful.
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
(via Pajamas Media)
