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.
From "The Second Coming" - W. B. Yeats
Do you ever get the feeling that we live in the age of Yeats' poem?
O Lord, bring order out of chaos.
Bring healing to the hurting.
Let light shine in the darkness.
No. Never.
ReplyDeleteHelloooooo!
And people wonder why I say no one listens.
Yes, I've felt that way for some time now.
ReplyDeleteI guess I was in high school when I first read this poem. It scared the shit out of me, too. "And what rough beast its hour come 'round at last slouches toward Bethlehem" --- or something like that...
These days it's that counterfeit of Christianity known as the religious right that I think of when I see or hear those lines.
hmmmmmmm.... the end times? --but the idea and term 'second coming' was coined just before he wrote this poem.... it is a thoroughly modern idea bereft of the idea of eternal and present time being one always.... now and forever....
ReplyDeleteSo, in faith --no.
Spiritually --emotionally --yeah. Frequently.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
ReplyDeleteAre full of passionate intensity.
Thus say the polls, for Election 2010. (Sigh)
I hope this doesn't sound patronizing or trite . . . but I don't know how secular/atheist progressives do it. I just couldn't endure it, w/o the (in my case, Christian) hope of "We can lose, but still---eschatologically---WIN".
I hope I/we don't have to wait quite that long! ;-/
Well it is either hope that we humans can muddle through even though we can't be sure or give up. I found the following recently which might express that.
ReplyDeleteWe need to find the courage to assert and act upon the hope, however naïve, that community can be found, because only by acting “as if” can we create a future fit for human habitation… Community means more than the comfort of souls. It means, and always has meant, the survival of the species…
(parker palmer, a place called community, pendle hill pamphlet 212, 1977)
BTW 'second coming' dates back well before Yeats. People have often thought the end was coming. Ideas like the rapture, etc. those are relatively new
"Second Coming" Erp, I think we are talking the same language --but just in case:
ReplyDelete"--All Christians up until the 1830’s believed in basically the same things about the second coming of Christ. During the 1830’s Margaret Macdonald, a Scottish member of a sect known as the Irvingites, made the first claim that there would be a trance (or rapture) and the faithful would be gathered to Christ before the period of persecution. The Protestant leader John Nelson Darby picked up this view. Cyrus Ingerson Scofield picked up Darby’s views and placed them in the footnotes of his Scofield Reference Bible. This Bible was widely used in England and America and many who read it readily accepted the idea of rapture.
But in the 1800s, some began to claim that the rapture would occur before the period of persecution. This position, now known as the "pre-tribulational" view, also was embraced by John Nelson Darby, an early leader of a Fundamentalist movement that became known as Dispensationalism. Darby’s pre-tribulational view of the rapture was then picked up by a man named C.I. Scofield, who taught the view in the footnotes of his Scofield Reference Bible, which was widely distributed in England and America. Many Protestants who read the Scofield Reference Bible uncritically accepted what its footnotes said and adopted the pre-tribulational view, even though no Christian had heard of it in the previous 1800 years of Church history."
www.catholic.com
So, yes --exactly Erp. Second Coming, understood in a present participle, future-present--right now, used as paraousia in the Greek, Advent in the Latin, the Day of the Lord --all that, understood differently for 1800 years than in its popular usage today, --not as the end of all things, but more as the next day of creation....
Alongside. Coming again (and again, and again, and again).
Is it all falling apart? From our perspective? --yeah, sometimes.... sure as hell feels that way....
--In faith, no.
Mark - the voice crying in the wilderness.
ReplyDeleteI fear for our country and what passes for Christianity more so today than when Bush II was president, because I see the madness spreading with greater rapidity.
JCF, I'm with you. I admire those with no faith who carry on, but I couldn't do it.
Of course, hope remains. Yeats wrote the poem in the aftermath of World War I, a terrible time surely. I don't think the poet referenced anything like the what the present-day rapture cultists believe is the Second Coming, nor do I.
Of course, in the name of Christ, we move forward in hope. We remain a people of hope, despite what we see before our very eyes.
I think what Yeats describes is the reality of life and death. We personally experience this dissolution in our own flesh; and the world is in a perpetual cycle of entropy and energy, with coalescence and senescence and evanescence.
ReplyDeleteIt is only the utopians who think in terms of a final achievement of that "shining city on a hill" -- the institutionalists who think an institution will solve all problems (e.g., the Covenant), who refuse to embrace the reality of life in the heart of -- not in spite of -- chaos.
Things are so much better now than when I was a child that I have a hard time thinking things are all bad now. A short scan of my first 20 years -When I was a child - girls were very limited in what they could do. Race relations were terrible. The Japanese were bombing the West Coast or so we believed - so we put American citizens in camps out of our fear. The McCarthy and HUAC was in full cry - putting my parent's friends out of work with accusations of "red" thinking. The Korean war was grinding on mostly out of sight. Vietnam - and all that.
ReplyDelete...who refuse to embrace the reality of life in the heart of -- not in spite of -- chaos.
ReplyDeleteYes, Tobias, that's it exactly.
I'm reminded of the the time the eye of Hurricane Gustav passed over us. The wind died, the blue sky was visible, but what a false calm, because the wind returned with greater fury than before, once the eye passed over us.
Ann, it was ever thus. The wish for utopia seems never to go away, at least for some of us.
I love Yeats.
ReplyDeleteThat's all I've a-got to say.
Me too, Cathy. "He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven" is my favorite. (At least I think it's my favorite...)
ReplyDeleteOh, and I agree with Tobias, by the way.
This may be OT, but Bollywood is going to do an epic film on the life of Jesus, on location in Israel. Anybody who wants to read the article can find it at The Lead.
ReplyDeleteI admit to mixed emotions about this, re the end times discussion here.
Oh yes, to "Cloths of Heaven".
ReplyDeleteHad I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
Achingly beautiful.
Bex, whatever we think, I expect that the movie will be made. We shall see what it will be.
ReplyDeleteMy favourite lines in Yeats are the last two of the last stanza of "The Song of Wandering Aengus":
ReplyDeleteThough I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
Ah yes, Cathy. Lovely. I might even say that I never read a Yeats poem that I didn't like.
ReplyDelete