The Second Coming

[SiobhanClancy]

everybody knows it,but in honor of St. Patrick's Day here it is:

THE SECOND COMING by W. B. Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center 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?

[NightTrain]

1. I don't need a second coming.

As long as I come once a night, I'll be just fine! :evilgrin:

[chicaloca]

6. after reading that poem a few months ago

My roommate's first comment was "Everybody should have a second coming."

Glad to see we're not the only ones who see a dirty side to that title. ;)

[greatauntoftriplets]

2. Siobhan, you are getting serious.

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven’s part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.

What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.

We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?

I write it out in verse -
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

[SiobhanClancy]

3. Easter 1916

My second favorite Yeats poem after the Second Coming.

[greatauntoftriplets]

4. Easter 1916 is my favorite.

Always feel sad when I read it.

Love Yeats. In general.

[Kenneth ken]

5. Joni

Mitchell put music to those words on her album Night Ride Home.

[Gildor Inglorion]

7. Come away, O human child

to the water and the wild
with a faery hand-in-hand,
for the world's more full of weeping
than you can understand.