THE SECOND COMING…W.B.Yeats~thoughts

Posted by ansman007

W.B. Yeats

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?

Yeats wrote this in the aftermath of WW I and there are many interpertations of it. I like it and given the genuflections of the pseudointellectual class of recent date, thought appropriate to drag this masterwork forth once more.

Just to scare you a bit – Yeats was quite the mystic, as I read this, it has the obvious religious overtones but deep within, it is a warning and not a threat.

If all is sacrificed at the alter of reason, the abyss is the reward. The bands that hold burst reeking havoc on a less than perfect world. Science is simply a tool, nothing more yet to see the justification as ‘science says or current findings are’ with a certainty that borders on fanaticism is simply the last refuge of the scoundrel. New findings or paradigm shifts alter our understanding and knowledge … but should never be mistaken for the ‘truth’ for progress always leads to new findings and deeper understanding.

To believe anything different is theorical folly and the path to peridition.

With the celebration of perversity and decadent mythos of openess, one can look for continued confusion and blather when the policies of enlightment only lead to darkness.

In other words, folks, we have gotten our tickets punched…