To celebrate St. Patrick’s Day (having rejected the idea of The Dubliner as unsound considering the mood I’m in and the massive need of getting to bed early due to Michael Moore having ruined my sleep completely last night) I thought: What more appropriate than some Yeats?
I thought I’d find a new poem to gush about (new to me, I mean) but came to The Second Coming and realised there was no getting past it. It’s too good. It’s way too appropriate. Not to St. Patrick’s, possibly, but certainly to Bowling for Columbine. So here we go:
The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot here the falconeer;
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?
— William Butler Yeats
Voice on the stereo: Bjarne Brøndbo singing Va det du Jesus (equally appropriate, unfortunately)