Maybe, sometime in the future, hope will return. For now, this is the poem speaks to me.
The Second Coming
W. B. 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?
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all too real. I thought of “I woke and felt the fell of dark, not day…”
Yes, that too. The end of the country I knew: unbearable.
I thought of this exact poem too but had forgotten the last stanza.
“It’s the end of the world as we know it,” and I feel anything but fine.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/44134
Sarah Lain posted this poem this morning and I feel it in my core.
I’m so sad and full of despair right now that nothing, not even poetry, is a consolation.
Me too. That’s why the Yeats poem speaks to me–no hopefulness, just dread.
I have nothing to add to the above. Such grief I’m feeling. So much we’re losing. And to think that this demagogue has the House and the Senate at his bidding. The Second Coming–yes.
Sharon, this poem speaks truth to America’s today. But after despair, anger will be appropriate, and necessary.
Music to grieve by. Thank you Sharon.
I’m too numb to feel anything today.
What I thought of was this, from Lapis; as a matter of fact about a month ago, I taught it as a class visitor. Of course it was one of Yeats’ last and it was scary times then, 1939. We were dancing to Cole Porter in our kitchen last night. One must sing, and dance, so as to keep ones spirits up.
…
On their own feet they came, or on shipboard,
Camel-back, horse-back, ass-back, mule-back,
Old civilisations put to the sword.
Then they and their wisdom went to rack:
No handiwork of Callimachus
Who handled marble as if it were bronze,
Made draperies that seemed to rise
When sea-wind swept the corner, stands;
His long lamp chimney shaped like the stem
Of a slender palm, stood but a day;
All things fall and are built again
And those that build them again are gay.
Two Chinamen, behind them a third,
Are carved in Lapis Lazuli,
Over them flies a long-legged bird
A symbol of longevity;
The third, doubtless a serving-man,
Carries a musical instrument.
Every discolouration of the stone,
Every accidental crack or dent
Seems a water-course or an avalanche,
Or lofty slope where it still snows
Though doubtless plum or cherry-branch
Sweetens the little half-way house
Those Chinamen climb towards, and I
Delight to imagine them seated there;
There, on the mountain and the sky,
On all the tragic scene they stare.
One asks for mournful melodies;
Accomplished fingers begin to play.
Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,
Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.
It’s interesting that Yeats speaks to us so powerfully right now. Thanks for this.
“The center cannot hold” feels particularly apropos.
I agree. Thus the feelings of nausea and disorientation.