The Scond Coming

[piquant]

OK, I was in my kitchen with my roommates, and they were talking about how everyone is moving away. All of a sudden, I shouted "The center cannot hold!" After I said it I had no idea where it came from, so I got on the internet and googled it. It was from the second coming by W.B. Yeats

"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 convictions, 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?

What's funny is that I don't remember ever reading this poem before. Isn't that creepy? I guess I probably read it a long time ago and just don't remember. Have any of you ever done that before?

PS- I love those last to lines. Don't they just give you chills and echo in your head.

[GapingStarling]

We did this poem in my high school Lit course - it's one of the ones I remember most vividly. Such great language... The last two lines, and also I really like

...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.

[Koa]

AAAH I knew the title 'the second coming' was telling me something, I read the poem and it sounded familiar...but I couldnt remember when I read it...I only got it when I read your introduction and knew it was Yeats!
So this useless piece of info is even on topic ;)
Yeats is so difficult to understand... I read this in a course so I was helped through it, but if I read it alone I just wouldnt be able to understand anything of it, maybe not even the mere sense of words...
(though then I didnt take the exam of the course so I forgot about it totally...it was nice to be reminded!!!)
Btw, I like the first lines best instead :)

[amuse]

sweet.. i will have to reread it when i have more time.

[Isagel]

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer"

There is something about those opening lines that gives me a feeling of being hopelessly lost - the picture of the bird in a big and empty sky, searching but not hearing the cries that will take it home.

It makes the small hairs on my neck stand up, and the feeling lingers for the rest of the poem.

[PrinceMyshkin]

It enhances one's appreciation of the poem if one knows something about Yeats' subscription to some theosophic views, e.g., that history operates in 2,000 year cycles, each of which is enunciated by the figure whose influence is to govern that period: Christ, in the period of which Yeats is writing. But the influence of that figure weakens as time goes on, in a spiral that grows wider and wider. In the meantime, a new gyre is narrowing to its enunciation point, which is to be the opposite - the anti-Christ in this case - of the currently dominant one.

[wheelfoot]

Perhaps you encountered this phrase in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart.

http://wsu.edu/~brians/anglophone/achebe.html

I believe I read this book in middle school. I suspect it is a fairly regular inclusion in a world/multicultural literature curriculum.