Tuesday Feb 27, 2007

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I love apocalyptic poetry. I give you the venerable "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats. Enjoy. I'm off to write a memo for Legal Writing.

SPOILERS! (Click to view)
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?

VIEW 5 of 5 COMMENTS
phantasy:
that site is the SHIT!! I bookmarked it!! love
dems:
I read Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart a few weeks ago, and was treated to this poem for the first time. While I can't claim to be a devotee of Yeats (or any other poet, or poem producing entity), it gave me chills reading it, and reminded me of the dearth of poetry in my life.

Don't suppose you'd have any recommendations for a raffish boor such as myself, would you?

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