William Butler Yeats’ “The Second Coming” has popped into my head more than once during this past upside-down week. Well, mainly the haunting and well-known line, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
I’m determined not to be drawn in by the outrage of the moment. The “ever-present subject” of this blog isn’t politics and it certainly isn’t Donald Trump, despite my first few posts. My aim is to write about all topics that interest me – not only politics, but also history, culture, science, etc. I remind myself that not everything deserves a reaction.
And yet … Trump and his pseudo-conservative cheerleaders (see my previous post) are living up to their expected awfulness – exceeding it, if that’s possible. It’s easy to feel like everything’s spinning off its axis.
Hence, thoughts of a century-old poem. Yeats wrote “The Second Coming” with the horrors of the First World War still raw and amid the Irish War of Independence and the 1918-19 flu pandemic that almost killed his pregnant wife, Georgie. In the poem, Yeats surveys a world unravelling and anticipates with dread the arrival of something even more unsettling.
“Literature is news that stays news,” Yeats’ contemporary, Ezra Pound, wrote in “ABC of Reading.” Since its publication, “The Second Coming” has remained profoundly resonant. Joan Didion notably quoted the poem in her essay, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” when she chronicled the disorder of 1967 Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco. The piece helped Didion regain her footing as a writer.
Perhaps that’s the lesson, then. Conviction may falter in the swirling chaos, but it doesn’t vanish. It remains to be rediscovered, reinvigorated, reinforced – an anchor to steady us.
The Second Coming
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?