The Second Coming
Hummingbird Featured Poem. 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?
Curator’s Note: This poem was brought forward in a very round-about way, and I actually have Joan Didion’s work to thank for pointing me in the direction of this haunting, moving poem by William Butler Yeats, Nobel Prize winning Irish poet and playwright. Having just completed Didion’s amazing, posthumously published Notes to John (fabulous, book short coming soon!), two close friends, both Didion lovers, recommended I read Slouching Towards Bethlehem. The Second Coming stands as the forward to the book. Of course, I had to look into it. Aside from the imagery and passion of the words first read, I couldn’t help but think—is this what Yeats, and later Didion foresaw? Is this what is happening now—crisis of faith, chaos, anarchy, and the worst of us full of passionate intensity? Has the rough beast’s hour come around at last? It surely gives us something to think about.
