“daddy grips the wheel stares alone into the distance/he knows that something somewhere has to break

[larryhammer]

For Poetry Monday, something by that younger brother of the more famous Jack:


The Second Coming, W. B. 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?


The first poem I can remember made my pulses pound (and my hair rise) on first reading it.

---L.

Subject quote from Synchronicity II, The Police.

Comments

[cmcmck]

It had the same effect on me at around sixteen years of age!

'The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.'

Those two lines say so much about so much!

[larryhammer]

Indeed.

[sovay]

The first poem I can remember made my pulses pound (and my hair rise) on first reading it.

It was not that for me, but it was my first Yeats and I was transfixed, and still am.

[larryhammer]

Yup, yup.

[branna]

Gets me every time. Also, it is too wretchedly appropriate just now.

[larryhammer]

All too appropriate ...

[thistleingrey]

Also, so very many literary allusions since!

[shewhomust]

Yes. Who was it said Shakespeare wasn't so great, he just strung a load of quotations together?

[larryhammer]

I first met the joke in a James Thurber story, but I doubt he was the first to make it.

[larryhammer]

It's highly quotable. Almost every line, really.