The Second Coming

[jazzy_dave]

Following on form my previous poem post, i have noted how much Yeats means to members of this LJ community. so here is a second poem by him and one which in my opinion , tangentially foreshadows the final few episodes of Buffy season 6 from "Seeing Red", the fatal gunshot ricochet that kills Tara caused by Warren ("The Trio" of nerds). Before this tragedy , Tara reconnects with Willow , and prefiguring entropy , says to Willow "Things Fall Apart". After the fatal shot Willow's eyes turns to red like the spatter of red blood on her clothes where the bullet goes through Tara, let alone the fatal wounding of Buffy. This is the turning point where the darkness of black magic turns Willow , anarchy and chaos is loosed upon the world.

The Second Coming was written in 1919, a year after the calamitous First World War.

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 sand;
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?

Comments

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

This one is just so intensely powerful.

[thespian15.livejournal.com]

I hope it's not the second coming, because I am so not ready. :o
Hugs, Jon

[davesmusictank.livejournal.com]

Nor me!

[davesmusictank.livejournal.com]

That last line "slouching towards Bethlehem" as the title for Angel season 4 episode 4 on which Cordelia comes back from her heavenly dimension but not knowing who she is, whilst Lorne senses a major evil is brewing.

[a-phoenixdragon.livejournal.com]

Definitely fitting...

[davesmusictank.livejournal.com]

That last line "slouching towards Bethlehem" as the title for Angel season 4 episode 4 on which Cordelia comes back from her heavenly dimension but not knowing who she is, whilst Lorne senses a major evil is brewing.

[blessed-oak.livejournal.com]

If Yeats were living now, he could have written the same thing, and I find it scary.

[davesmusictank.livejournal.com]

Oh so true!

[nutmeg3.livejournal.com]

I adore Yeats, and this is one of my favorites of his poems.