Tuesday Poem: William Butler 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: 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?

---

I bought this dishcloth in Ireland last summer,
and recently pulled it out from a suitcase
where it's sat for the past year.
Before using, I ran it through the wash,
and upon using it, noticed that Yeats appears
to be crying, where the stitching has pulled.
What terrible calamity has befallen us
that has caused the great poet to weep?
Ah yes, "the blood-dimmed tide is loosed"
foretells the gash in the ocean's floor
in the Gulf Coast --
And as poet, I believe that this tear-shedding dishcloth
trumps every single slice of toast bearing the image of Jesus.

 

---

For more Tuesday Poets click here.