William Butler 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 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: 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?
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The classic example of Modernism lies in the line “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,” which by extension declares that there is a moral or social “center” from which we have lost hold, spiraling into the darkness of the unknown, ungoverned by any moral core. This is Yeats’ response to the world of the First World War, a war among wealthy, powerful, rather degenerate and often incompetent European monarchies fought by everyone but them.
How appropriate then for our Post-Modernist time when the world is racked by oppression, conflict, discord and violence in a chaos of the Ongoing World War, a war among wealthy, powerful, degenerate and often incompetent world autocracies, many of whom make war on their own subjects. If there ever was a moral center, it has faded into complete obscurity.
What “rough beast’s” hour is coming around now to save us? How long must we wait for anything to come from without to save us from ourselves?
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The great lesson of history, well recorded in our Humanities: We have learned nothing from history, except how to repeat it, as this phrase has often coined.
... JAEZZ Views 
Autumn in the Marsh
28 October 2024 Leave a comment
One red leaf among the once green,
before a threatening, clouded sky.
One leaf among all this dying
and brown and fading foliage.
One calm thing among the noise
of the highway, the gun shots,
the jet engines, the dry winds.
One red leaf among the once green,
above the fetid and receding marsh.
One leaf among all this drying
of the broken branches and grass.
One bright thing among the browns
of the caked mud, the bare ground,
the empty nest, the flying dust.
One red leaf fluttering in the breeze.
Why does this one red leaf
so proudly beam its rapture,
when it knows
it too will soon fail and fall?
jay@jaezz.org
Filed under Poetry, Reflections, Social Commentary