William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
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: a waste of desert and;
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?
The railroad tracks heading into Washington from Rockville.

Things Fall Apart... the novel by Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe takes its title from the Yeats poem “The Second Coming.”

The rain started when I was halfway through my walk this morning. I had gone a bit farther than I had intended and was at least a mile from Nancy’s house when the combination of peppery rain, rusty fences, and broken concrete in a symphony of images brought to my mind Achebe's novel and Africa’s troubles...and the wars in the Middle East...and our own deteriorating political scene in Washington... I will go down to central D.C. tomorrow, to the Capital Mall; and I am wondering if there will be any signs in that beautiful place that there is confounding confusion in Congress. I was living in Washington during the Nixon/Watergate years, and I remember marveling that the city and the nation managed to put on a good face to the rest of the world. It’s not so easy these days. Yeats poem was written just as World War I was grinding to a halt. Being a person who sees the glass half full, I try to imagine a world where things are getting better; but sometimes it is difficult to see a bright future for our nation and indeed for the world. I will go back to Nancy’ house and take another close look at the irises.

“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;”