December 2022 A Cracked Mirror
- What shatters my image?
- How do I undo the crack?
- What Image do I project?
The Second Coming
Narrated by Eugene Marckx
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center 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 the sands of the desert
A shape with a 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?
by William Butler Yeats, 1865 – 1939
William Butler Yeats wrote “The Second Coming” in 1919, during the Modern literary period and shortly after World War I ended. It was published in 1920 in a prominent literary magazine called The Dial. In his poem, Yeats uses the Christian belief in the Second Coming of Christ as a metaphor for the dismal state of post-war Europe. The collapse of Western society is represented by a Second Coming that is devoid of salvation and instead gives way to a “rough beast” that makes its menacing descent upon humanity.