A Poem for the 2016 Election
For the very first time, our usually prosaic Sightings column gives space this week to a poem, one rich in metaphor
By Martin E. MartyNovember 14, 2016
For the very first time, our usually prosaic Sightings column gives space this week to a poem, one rich in metaphor. It was written in 1919, but is seen as newly relevant.
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?
—W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”
Resources
- Doggett, Rob. Deep-Rooted Things: Empire and Nation in the Poetry and Drama of William Butler Yeats. University of Notre Dame Press, 2006.
- Foster, R. F. W. B. Yeats: A Life, Vol. 1: The Apprentice Mage. Oxford University Press, 1997.
- —. W. B. Yeats: A Life, Vol. 2: The Arch-Poet. Oxford University Press, 2003.
- Howes, Marjorie. Yeats's Nations: Gender, Class and Irishness. Cambridge University Press, 1996.
- Owen, Alex. The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern. University of Chicago Press, 2004.
- Smith, Stan. The Origins of Modernism: Eliot, Pound, Yeats and the Rhetorics of Renewal. Harvester, 1994.
- Yeats, W. B. The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Vol. 1: The Poems. Ed. Richard J. Finneran. Scribner, 1997.
Image: William Butler Yeats (1933) | Photo credit: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division [cph.3b34058]
![]() |
Sightings is edited by Brett Colasacco, a PhD candidate in Religion, Literature, and Visual Culture at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Click here to subscribe to Sightings as a twice-weekly email. You can also follow us on Twitter.