Turning and turning in the widening gyre

[struggle4progress]

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: a waste of desert sand;
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
Wind 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
The Second Coming, 1919

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

1. I keep thinking about that one -

it's been going through my mind lately.

[elleng]

2. Thank you. Hadn't thought of it,

but glad to get back into Poetry mode.

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

[flying rabbit]

3. Yeah.

That one. "Ozymandius" comes to mind as well.

[philly_bob]

4. Wonderful poem, remembering it lately. But can anyone explain "widening gyre"? /nt

[Hekate]

6. Falcons and hawks fly upward in a spiral, a gyre. As they rise the spiral widens out...

They see more and more -- but in this case the falcon has escaped the control of its master. It has gone too far out to hear the command to return.

Hope that helps. It's a magnificent poem, written right after WWI and just as the Irish Revolution was beginning.

[philly_bob]

9. Many thanks, Hekate. Several lines of that poem have run through my head for years..../nt

[susanna]

5. I have thought about this one

many times, but never so much as since November 9, 2016.

[Hekate]

7. Thanks for bringing this here, now. nt

[raven mad]

8. As a major fan of Yeats -

Thank you.

[MineralMan]

10. I think of that poem frequently these days.

Thanks for posting it!