Saturday 10 January 2009

And What Rough Beast?


With Gaza still afire and dominating another weeks news, one can't help having a poem by W.B Yeats "THE SECOND COMING" cross ones mind.


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?

Its amazing how much mythology and symbology centres on "The Holy Land" as being where the final days will start.

The last two lines of the poem "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?" seems particularly pertinent at the moment.
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2 comments:

  1. Anonymous30 January 2009 at 13:09

    What a fantastic line
    "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?" ... really conjures a vision

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. No PC8 February 2024 at 07:20

      Just as pertinent today as it was when written or in 2009. Sorry for the late response.

      Delete

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