Second Coming
Dating from my Irish secondary schooling, I still retain a certain appreciation for the poetry of William Butler Yeats to this day. In fact, it was to Yeats that I turned when I needed a quote for the front of my doctoral thesis and my action inspired a fellow compatriot when it was his turn to do the same.
Maybe there was a certain sense of tumult surrounding our endeavours that we had recourse to the poetry of Yeats. He was writing during a time of global war and rising nationalism that was accompanied by the struggle for Irish independence. In our own troubled times, the words of Second Coming have a certain timelessness about them and that is why I am including them here. As write these words in late 2019, the following lines strike a particular resonance that remind us that history needs constant re-reading if we are not to keep repeating ourselves.
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?
