THE BEAST
POEM FOR THE DAY
W. B. YEATS, 1919
THE SECOND COMING (POEM)
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming


THIS IS A FORGOTTEN, AND ALL TOO TIMELY, POEM. MY FAVORITE POEMS AND FICTION CAME FROM THE 1890 TO 1920 ENGLISH LITERATURE COURSE AT UNC -- CHAPEL HILL. IT’S PARTLY BECAUSE THOSE WRITERS REALLY WERE GREAT POETS, BUT ALSO BECAUSE THAT TIME PERIOD IS THE BASIS FOR OUR OWN TODAY.

UNFORTUNATELY, WE SEEM TO BE ON A LOOP, WITH A DECADE OR MORE OF HORROR AHEAD AGAIN. MAYBE THINGS WILL BE OKAY IF ENOUGH OF US WILL READ AND THINK AND THEN STICK OUR HEADS OUT THE WINDOW AND SHOUT, “I’M MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GONNA TAKE IT ANY MORE!!” COULD THAT WORK?


https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming
The Second Coming
BY WILLIAM BUTLER 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: 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?