Here is a poem for you from Yeats, written in 1921. What do you think?
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?
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When I read this poem, I remember a friend's amusing reaction: "Mere anarchy? MERE anarchy??" (he was an anarchist, indignant). Yeats with hyperlinks? Interesting.
ReplyDeleteThank you for the correspondence. I mean to get back to you, and I'll probably have more profound thoughts when it's not 2am with me packing for a canoeing trip.
I've also started blogging again, incidentally. I've done so on and off for about the past 8 years. Unually I stop because the perfect becomes the enemy of the good. This time, I'm just not taking myself as seriously. It's more of a journey, an exploratory space, more of what you were talking about in your paper concept.