While we’re on the topic
Posted by lawgeek on 31 Jan 2007 at 08:21 pm | Tagged as: Music and Arts
W.B. Yeats, THE SECOND COMING (1919)
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 convictions, 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?
Does anybody here know anything about Yeats? I know virtually nothing, apart from the fact that George Orwell (with regret) expressed the view that he (Yeats) was a fascist. I’d be curious to know more about him.
Plus ca change…
Years ago, I was guided around Kilmainham Jail in Dublin by a bright-eyed young woman who had read ‘Easter, 1916′ too many times. Many too many times.
Was he a fascist fascist, or Orwell’s idea of a fascist? ‘An Irish Airman Forsees His Death’ doesn’t strike me that way at all.
OTOH, there were some serious Irish fascists through the 1920s and 30s – a certain number ended up fighting for the Republicans in Spain.
Wikipedia says:
I don’t remember the context of Orwell’s remarks. It was in some collection of essays I was reading summer after Grade 11 or something. It was probably written in the 1930s where I would assume these terms were being used a bit loosely.
As Orwell himself pointed out.
The “twenty centuries of stony sleep” waiting for the creature to be born reminds me of the acrobatic performance art piece I saw at City Hall last week, which had a meandering, intermittent narrative weaving together several myths. About 2/3 of the way in the images on the canvas-covered boxes suddenly turned to terrible things, mostly images of war/famine/what have you in the 20th century, and the omniscient narrator intoned something about an age of evil. The only actual face shown upon the screen was GWB’s — and I’m sorry, no one likes him, but we surely can’t be using him as a proxy for all the many, varied terrible things wrought by terrible people in the 20th century, too?
Though as I recall, probably used somewhat loosely by Orwell himself…
GWB as symbol of the evils of the century is certainly over the top–reminiscent of Marx on tragedy and farce…