Author Topic: The Second Coming by Yeats (Read 469 times)

Dawn · « **on:** October 28, 2007, 02:26:39 PM »

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 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?

I posted here as Yeats dabbled in things not at all Catholic. Nor do I think he was ever a memeber of the Faith. Still, the poem is certainly interesting.

Kephapaulos · « **Reply #1 on:** October 28, 2007, 03:23:31 PM »

I remember doing some kind of paper to do with Yeats when I was in high school. He was indeed Irish but sadly not Catholic, if I am not mistaken.

Dawn · « **Reply #2 on:** October 28, 2007, 04:15:02 PM »

That wife he married,led him straight to the occult and well, who knows....

Adesto · « **Reply #3 on:** October 28, 2007, 04:31:37 PM »

"...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?"

This has always sent a shiver of horror down my spine. I find this one of the most sinister images in English poetry, the rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem. Fantastic poem, but what a horrific image! The urgency of the imminent threat to the innocent...

That line "things fall apart, the center cannot hold" is a great one- I'm using it (anachronistically) as a title for an essay on the Morte D'Arthur atm.