The Second Coming
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 Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the 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?
William Butler Yeats
1920
A post-Christian riff on Jeremiah.
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
This phrase is a contradiction. Tho with some poetic license we get his drift. A variation of when the good do nothing…
My view is that those who have recently acquired wealth are the most remarkable for “passionated intensity.” So they pursue those who threaten their new found wealth.
Like Chaney who grew up poor saying that “we deserve it” after the tax cut for the rich that he pushed became law.
Similarly for those whose ancestors immigrated here several decades ago. How much contempt for those who seek to enter now.
A variation of Shapespeare’s “S/he protests too much.”
Yeats is a little ominous, don’t you think, Cathy? Here’s one I prefer: it’s from W. H. Auden’s “Christmas Oratio,” at the end of For The Time Being:
For the time being, here we all are,
Back in the modern Aristotelian city
Of darning and the Eight-Fifteen,
Where Euclid’s geometry
And Newton’s mechanics woud account
for our experience, and the kitchen table
exists because I scrub it.
It seems to have shrunk
during the holidays. The streets
Are much narrower than we
remembered; we had forgotten
The office was as depressing as this.
To those who have seen The Child,
however dimly, however incredulously,
The Time Being, is, in a sense,
The most trying time of all.
For the innocent children who
Whispered so excitedly
Outside the locked door where they
Knew the presents to be
Grew up when it opened. Now,
Recollecting that moment,
We can repress the joy, but the guilt
Remains conscious;
Remembering the stable where
For once in our lives
Everything became a You
And nothing was an It……
God’s Will will be done,
God will cheat no one,
Not even the world of its triumph.
Gene, your poem is far more fitting for Christmas–thanks for posting it.
Cathy, both poems quoted seem to be ‘prophetic’, don’t you agree or is the second one too general? (For those of you who have not read Cathy’s ground breaking work “Prophecy and Casuistry” in the 2006 Villanova Law Review, I am playing on those words).
Is there a lack of casuistry in both or do they fall into another category? I am in the middle of studying or analyzing this article so the questions that I have now might be answered by Cathy at the end of the article.
For now, Cathy, it seems to me that you frame prophecy as negative while reason is positive. But you do note the origin of prophecy in the OT. Does prophecy as a positive have a chance?
These are very legitimate questions because the prophetic religions, Judaism, Islam and Christianity have a terrible history of violence. I find this very disturbing.
Further, among his other titles, Jesus is considered by all a prophet. Yet he is totally non-violent. Francis of Assissi and a few others seem to have gotten the message but few others.
Here is one of the many discussions on Cathy’s work online. http://www.mirrorofjustice.com/mirrorofjustice/2006/11/a_message_from_.html
“A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs …”
Hey! I seen this at Target on Christmas Eve. She had a giant tin of Danish butter cookies under one arm and some electronic component under the other, her gimlet eyes trained on the only no-waiting check-out.
You wanna see what rough beast is about to be born, run out for a few last-minute things on Christmas Eve.
A commentator on NPR last years suggested we take the “Christ” out of “Christmas,” and I’m ready to say “amen.”
I have often thought that suspicion of the Reformers that “Christmas” was more gentile feast than a Christian one was not so far off the mark.
I have noticed this year some people saying “Merry Christmas” rather emphatically. I usually respond “to you too”, out of politeness, but as most people would interpret “merry”, if they gave it some thought, there is nothing especially Christian about the sentiment. Our parish builletin claims that originally this now favored greeting meant “have a blessed and peaceful Christmas” but the OED provides no support for that view. The OE word “myrig” seems to have meant simply pleasant, agreeable.
The nuns who taught me preferred “Happy Christmas” to “Merry Christmas” but preferred “Blessed Christmas” to either of the above. I sometimes write that on blank cards.
Actually “Merry Christmas” rather neatly captures the hybrid nature of the holy day/holiday that we have. But knowing that is no fun if most of the world thinks it is a sign of piety to say “Merry Christmas” What to do? “Merry Christmas” as irony? “Buon Natale” anyone?
The commentary about taking Christ out of Christmas was actually two years ago (time flies when you’re having fun), and here’s the link:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4199821
I grew up in a secular family whose female members went into a frenzied competition of gift-buying, baking and redecorating over the birth of a god nobody believed in.
It was a very weird and anxious time of year. Not the fault of Christmas, Lord knows, but I think Yeats’ poem captures a lot of what’s wrong with this holiday, even though he was talking about something else entirely.
To all the bloggers at Commonweal: Merry Christmas!
Bob Schwartz
St. Rose of Lima Parish
Simi Valley, Ca
Bill, thanks for reading my article. I guess I wasn’t thinking about poetry when I wrote the piece–more about interventions in the public square. So I’m not sure that the poems would even fit in my grid.
I like Yeats’s edginess, the sense that it’s not all in a box with homemade Christmas cookies and beautifully wrapped presents (“a full house–priceless” –the Mastercard commercial). He also gives you a sense of how much the coming of Christ turned the world upside down.
Jean, I think I met the same rough beast– but at Target in Massachusetts, not in Michigan, standing guard over the last few 9 volt batteries. It must have a sleigh too, just like Santa.