Slouching toward Bethlehem.

[Skidmore]

WB Yeats' great poem has been on my mind this morning.

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?

http://www.mcabee.org/~lcm/lines/slouch.html

[Poll_Blind]

1. With good reason. n/t

PB

[Amused Musings]

2. One of the most haunting and terrifying poems

of the twentieth century. I always heard conflicting views on how sympathetic he was to fascism- but damn- he is one of the best english language poets of the modern times.

[phantom power]

3. Yeats would have been at home here in the early 21st century.

the center cannot hold.

[ljm2002]

4. I've been thinking about it too!

Just yesterday I remarked to a friend, these verses:

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."

are a perfect description of our current political situation.

And that's only two lines.

It's one of the truly great poems of the 20th century, and yes it is all too apropos right now.