HBO's Carnivale and William Butler Yeats' "The Second Coming"

[imenja]

I'm on a mission to convince DU that this Yeats poem captures nicely the ambiguity between good and evil in the HBO series Carnivale. I thought of the poem when considering what might be lurking in Sophie's womb. Plus, Yeats is divine so it's always nice to read one of his poems.

So what do you all think?


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 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?

[Demit]

1. The Second Coming could be describing the whole Bush administration

and its unholy cohorts. "The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity." That's always been one of my favorite lines.

[imenja]

2. yes, and simply our times in general

I believe Yeats wrote the poem around World War I.