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?
Source: The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1989)
AUDIO
The Second Coming
FROM AUDIO POEM OF THE DAYJuly 2020
By W.B. Yeats
Interestingly, Yeat’s gyre analogy is remarkably similar to the riptide analogy used by the author of this commentary. (A gyre is, of course, a circular , whirlpool like current with much in common to a riptide)
Yeat’s verse that really hits home to me is -
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
It sums up, in a nut shell, the situation we find ourselves in these days.
Even now, a majority of American's see what is going on around them and realize that something is very wrong but we simply cannot muster the courage and summon the will to to put a foot down and say enough is enough to the passionate zealots who work tirelessly and will stop at nothing to ram their wicked agenda down our throats.
Their motto and battle cry is -”by any means necessary” and they are deadly serious about the “by any means” approach to what they feel is “necessary” .