Yeats: The Second Coming. One of the Greatest Poems Ever Written

[yellowwood]

This poem was written in the bloody aftermath of WWI,1919,when after we helped Britain and France win the war, they refused to listen to us and imposed terrible punishments on Germany. The Germans looked to a strong leader and found Hitler.
These lines: The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity.
say so much.
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?

[nenagh]

1. Thank you, yellowwood..

[barbtries]

2. timely for me.

i just watched Waiting for Armageddon http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/Waiting_for_Armageddon/70129310?trkid=2361637#height1857 over the weekend. all that passionate intensity dedicated to destruction of the world and the permanent, bloody death of all but themselves. and they really believe it apparently.

[localroger]

3. Whenever I think of this poem

...I can't help but think of the general in Stephen King's The Stand who is obsessed by the last line as he bears news of the superflu wiping out the human race.

[H2O Man]

4. Recommended.

I used to wish that The Doors would make a song of it.

[Odin2005]

5. K&R

[KittyWampus]

6. LOL! He was in the Theosophist/Golden Dawn circles. Most DU'ers ridicule where this came from

[gauguin57]

7. I have read this poem over and over (and quoted it in English papers), and it still freaks me out.

I get the creepiest feeling reading it ... it really is a fabulous, moving poem. My #1 poem is still "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by Eliot, but a lot of Yeats poems are right up there on my hit parade (including this one).

One of the last big papers I wrote for my master's program was about Yeats ... I loved learning about his theory of gyres in history (two turning gyres, one inside the other, representing the end of one type of historical era while a new, contrary historical era began).

Yeats would be on the "2012" bandwagon, I have no doubt!