a hundred years of dark prophecy

 

Part of it showed up on a friend's Facebook page, reminding me that not only was Yeats' poem a hundred years ago agonizingly prophetic, but that even its title is in-your-face and up-yours ironic. 

Every nation has its Jerusalem if not necessarily its Bethlehem, and the terrible uneasiness that Yeats' poem stirs is that it's not Jesus that's coming, but a brutal monster, and that it's not Gospel good news, but something unimaginably horrifying. 

Here's the entire 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?