Liberties

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 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?        W.B. YEATS Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; …. The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. In every crisis they appear, those famous and familiar lines from “The Second Coming,” written in 1919 by W. B. Yeats. Journalists and critics alike seem to take them as final assertions of Yeats’ own beliefs. Such innocent judgments do not ask why those lines open the poem, or for how long their assertions remain asserted. The poem itself has become lost behind the quotability of its opening lines. And Yeats, it seems, wants to be a pundit. In our ready “yes, yes” to those lines, we think we are accepting the judgment of