ISIS, the rough beast
Read this, and think of ISIS:
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 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?
I’ve quoted that poem several times before, and have explained that it keep coming to my mind right after 9/11. These days it seems more than ever that the rough beast is on the march.
[NOTE: You might want to read an older post of mine that I think relevant to the business at hand.]
A rabbi was just murdered in Miami. Does that mean Jews will have to carry guns?
Another Obama legacy?
Alas.
How do we know where we are?
Awareness might be considered foolishness.
Preparation might be considered waste.
What is wise might be considered brutality, until the nightmare happens.
I have also often recalled that poem by Yeats as a prophetic one after 9/11. It feels more and more real…
The times just seem to be tumbling toward an eclipse of blood and hell unleashed on earth. Indeed —
My nephew, who just turned 30 (!!!), hadn’t read Yeats’s poetry. (They don’t teach DWM stuff in school any more, unless it’s Howard Freekin Zinn.)
S’anyway, when we were all at the beach, I copied it off the Net and wrote it out by hand and left it on his bed. He was floored: it got him in the solar plexus.
Just a little moment of light getting through the crack….
Like Shakespeare, Yeats’ work has endured because it speaks to fundamental human nature. Thankfully, the sentiments expressed in this poem on recur periodically.
Perhaps that’s why they take on an eerie quality; there’s no banality of daily exposure, while remaining true.
William Blake’s Tyger is more fitting for these modern day characters.
The key line in that poem for me has always been the one about the best and the worst of people. When I look around me these days, I see more and more people full of passionate intensity.
Robert Frost’s ONCE BY THE PACIFIC always evokes a similar shudder in me.
The shattered water made a misty din.
Great waves looked over others coming in,
And thought of doing something to the shore
That water never did to land before.
The clouds were low and hairy in the skies,
Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.
You could not tell, and yet it looked as if
The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff,
The cliff in being backed by continent;
It looked as if a night of dark intent
Was coming, and not only a night, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There would be more than ocean-water broken
Before God’s last Put out the light was spoken.
BuddaHat:
Yes, that poem evokes the same feeling in me. The Yeats poem even more so, though.
There’s no reason for America’s leadership class to have conviction. They aren’t the best after all. Did people think they were?
As for the foolish lot of mobs, they are merely tools. One doesn’t have high expectations of monkeys copying what they are told to do.
Does anyone here, with few exceptions, lack conviction? I think not, though I may doubt the ingrained conviction of some when it all comes down to dust. Family and longterm reliable friends are the basis of resistance. If you do not have that you are a member of only the lonely.
It’s chilling, but ‘The Second Coming’ certainly catches my dismal sense of the times. But then I began to have that feeling the night Obama was first elected.
He has disappointed so many of his followers but he has not disappointed me – – too bad I expected nothing but ruin from him.
Barry: the anarchist president.
It sort of figures — since Ayers launched him into politics — chaos by other means.