I find myself pulling up all sorts of lines from literature, from culture at large, I suppose, that pertain to the life place I am in. Hemmingway, Marvell, today it's Yeats. The Second Coming. A brilliant piece. A poem about apocalyptic times, end times. As poems speak often on many levels, this one speaks to internal turmoil and tumult. The end of days, as it were, inside.
Don't know how old W. B. pulled it off. Can't imagine where it came from. The poem, that is. Like Einstein reaching into the ether and coming back with e = mc(2). Perfect. What did Michaelangelo say, the angel was already there inside the marble; he simply chiseled it free. Thusly so with this work.
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 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?
Mere anarchy is is loosed. The center can not hold. I get that. Don't you? Things spinning about Wizard of Oz like. Tumbling and turning, in a widening gyre, up, up, and away. Who doesn't wish for a big, red button that could be pushed in times of complete chaos and imminent catastrophe? My how the poet captured the internal anarchy and gyre. Today is Thursday. I get on that plane at 7:00 Tuesday morning.
And how does one properly slog forward into the maelstrom of details and of financial obligation and comstant over stimulation and requirements for attention. How much caffeine is there? How much can one cram into one's system before it shuts you down? Or how does one escape? And can one do so in a fashion that is not self destructive?
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