This month its WB Yeats's classic The Second Coming. (Are you still looking for a title for your magnum opus? This is a good place to start, here or perhaps in Yeats's Sailing To Byzantium.)
The Second Coming
WB 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: 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?
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13 comments:
I did lift a line from Yeats Sailing to Byzantium, but it was for a short story, not a magnum opus.
The last time I read Yeats was in a stormswept bed and breakfast on the Dingle peninsula while my sister and nephew played chess. It was very nice. I don't remember now if I had brought the book, or if there was a copy in the guest house. Either way, I was quite happy to have a copy to hand.
I think I understand Second Coming less well now than I did when I was eighteen or nineteen. Or I don't quite buy it anymore.
Thanks for posting, I really like that. Hard to bounce around online and then take time to read a poem , but it's worth it.
Seana
I think sailing to byz has more natural titles in it but there are quite a few in this too. Its the Hamlet soliloquy of the twentieth century.
I dont really buy it either but I still like it. I buy his fairy poems even less.
Dennis
My sentiments exactly. In fact thats why, I think, poetry is more important than ever. We're drowning in a sea of words and information and its nice that there are people out there trying to make us pay attention to a few brief lines.
Adrian,
I love the poetry posts. It's rare these days to be challenged to consider and analyze brief and beautiful words and lines like these. What's your take on this poem?
Thanks.
DJD
I think he's commenting on the apocalyptic nature of the times and how the promise of the King of Peace has turned into almost universal war because of the nature of man. Yeats of course was a believer in the Old Religion, i.e. Robert Graves's so called White Goddess and I think he rejected the whole Abrahamic top down patriarchal edifice in favour of a bottom up earth worshiping matriarchy - although I'm not sure that works either.
I first read it as the dedication to Joan Didion's early collection of essays Slouching Toward Bethelem, which might be why it no longer reads as it once did.
Yes, keep the poetry coming.
The meaning of the Yeats poem cannot be put into a definition, but it has been worked into several novels, including Walter Van Tilburg Clark's THE OX-BOW INCIDENT and Cormac McCarthy's NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN.
The poem is about the cycling of the eternal masculine/material and the eternal feminine/spiritual in Mankind. Apollo vs. Dionysus, though this too is beyond the words used here to describe it.
In NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, Chirgurh is the masculine/materialist, the psychopath with no compassion. Sheriff Bell is the opposite pole. Bell has compassion both for the victim and the perpetrator, for the hawk Chigurh kills, for the horses shying at the dead bodies.
The cycle is the evolution of consciousness and compassion. It goes, body to mind to spirit; or, animal man to mental man to spiritual man.
The best are spiritual liberals lacking all conviction, with compassion for all, while the worst are self-righteous materialists full of passionate intensity.
The trinity in NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN is Chigurh as animal man, Moss as the divided-mind, Bell as compassionate man. The moss only grows on one side of the tree because the sun shines on only one side. Moss is Apolloian when the sun shines, but he is Dionysian at night.
Which is why Moss can steal the money during the day, but why against all logic, he wants to go back and give the dying man water at night.
Interesting. Thanks for your comments. I'm going to look into the Old Religion / White Goddess thing a little. I find it interesting that Jesus' claims to bring peace have been realized more in a metaphysical / spiritual sense than a physical one - so far anyway. I think that's primarily what He meant to do all along - although His followers certainly didn't "see" it when He was on the earth. Thanks again for the challenging thoughts.
Richard
I think maybe you're thinking of Sailing to Byzantium too. To really get that poem you probably need to be a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
DJD
Its interesting that in rural Catholic Ireland that they largely skipped the whole notion of Jesus and continuing worshiping Brigid, in the form of Mary, the mother of God. No Irish Catholic in an emergency will ever pray to Jesus, its always Mary.
Re: Sailing to Byzantium
Of course the title, NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, is one among lots of other things derived from that. Even the dustjacket, "O sages standing in God's holy fire" seems to have been inspired from "Sailing to Byzantium."
But the prologue of NCFOM has Bell musing that "Somewhere out there is a true and living prophet of destruction..." The "lobos and leones" out there are the new generation of animal men whose unevolved level of consciousness and compassion makes them barbarians at the gate.
They slouch toward Bethlehem (a higher state of consciousness).
At any rate, thanks for posting a Yeats poem. I think it might have occurred to him in a dream and perhaps he did not understand it on a conscious level himself. But it must have seemed right at the time or he wouldn't have published it.
Richard
A bit like Coleridge then eh?
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