Yeats! Yeats! Yeats!

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This poem is incredible.

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 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?

We read it in English today, in preparation for our unit on the novel Things Fall Apart. Yeats wrote it at the end of World War I, and it depicts the birth of a new and brutal age after that event. It refers to the Yeats' theory of gyres. In gyre theory,
history is created with the orderly oscillation of two great memes, or gyres, in 2000 year cycles. The poem is an ominous warning to the world that the "primary" gyre is soon to spiral into chaos and die, leaving the "antithetical" gyre, on the decline for the last 2000 years, to rise again.

Of course I do not prescribe to gyre theory, but that is a damn good poem.

It is beautifully written. Every image is vivid.

Yeats is alright.

I like some of Yeats too but don't neglect Auden or Shakespeare or Donne or E.E.Cummings or Dickinson or Nash or Lewis Carroll or Dr. Seuss.

And then there's also T.S.Eliot and Dylan Thomas and William Blake and Poe and Gerard Manley Hopkins and Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore and Robert Graves and Sylvia Plath and Dorothy Parker and Edna St.Vincent Millay and Billy Collins and a hell of a lot more.

Also, I've written some stuff myself.

I'm seeing that I must read more Yeats. I recently came across "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" as rendered in song by Gary Stadler. I listen to it every time the city is getting to me. I grew up in a place where I didn't even have neighbors, so the city gets to me a lot.

Yeats is good.. need to read more though.

I swear that poem's been stalking me for about 3 months..