I keep thinking about this very prescient poem:

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

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: a waste of desert sand;
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
Wind 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 (1865-1939)

[Grey Lemercier]

1. I knew that this was the poem before I even clicked!

[LisaM]

11. I thought so too.

I have been studying this poem a lot recently. It's also ironic that Yeats wrote a poem about 1916....

[ailsagirl]

2. Thank you for posting

[elleng]

3. Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

The best lack all conviction,
while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

[DonCoquixote]

8. YES

we know who those "best" were
and we know who the worst are.

[still_one]

4. wow

[raging moderate]

5. Me too.

But then there is this one:
"The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it."

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

6. John 1. In principio erat verbum.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

7. "Little by little the of the country changes because of the men we admire."

From the movie Hud. I didn't see that movie until 1982, and when that was said I nearly fell out of my chair, because it is the single most prescient line ever.

In my opinion.

[Stonepounder]

9. Been one of my favorite poems since I first read it over 50 years ago.

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

[maddiemom]

10. I KNEW, before clicking to your post, that you'd be referring to Yeats' "Second Coming"

This poem while not only prescient: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity..." originally related to WWI, but little has changed in nearly a hundred years. Trump sadly sounds like " the rough beast, its hour come round at last." All the reality we liberal Americans believed was coming around---mistaken(?) BYTW, this poem, percentage-wise, probably has comparatively more quotes used as literary titles per line than all of of Shakespeare's plays taken overall.

[yewberry]

12. Me too. I posted it on FB about a week after the election myself.

Surprised how many people didn't recognize it.

[Crunchy Frog]

13. That was quoted here alot during the Bush/Cheney regime.

Probably more appropriate now, though. We just didn't know when we had it good.