For starters, I’d like to see how many people are paying attention. I have a new copy of Claudia Rankine’s book , Citizen. I will add it, gratis, for the next person who orders a book from me.
Now to this weeks poet.
I wasn’t, as many poets were, enamored with poetry in high school. It kind of intimidated me. But in a college survey class on English Lit, I was exposed to Yeat’s and this is the first poem that I fell in love with. I found it way more accessible that other poems I had read prior. In other words, I “got it” right away. I studied it. It drew me in to poetry, and eventually I found Ferlinghetti and was hooked, but he’s for next week.
Here’s the Yeat’s poem, although I’m sure many of you have read it several times:
The Second Coming
By William Butler 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?
Don’t forget the offer of Rankine’s book. Thanks for listening. See you next week.