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Bynum Petty
Not unrelated to this continuing discussion are the events of this past year, 2020—political, social, ethical, and moral. For those of us who studied English under the sturdy, yet benevolent hand of Werna Harrision, we know that Yeats wrote “The Second Coming” in 1919 shortly after the end of World War I. This was also the time of the Spanish flu pandemic and of great political unrest in Ireland. Although written 100 years ago, the poem may as well have been conceived yesterday.
Happy New Year (we hope!)
Bynum
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?
—William Butler Yeats
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