Editor:
I couldn’t help but recall this most famous and prescient of poems from the early twentieth century. This was composed at the end of The First Great War. The Second Great War would be along in less than twenty years. And now with war spreading throughout the world it seems appropriate to quote one of the most famous lines:
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity
Our world is full of confidence men. If not that, then gutless self-serving functionaries, all smirk and ingratiation, all visage and front, all a vacuum inside.
Also with all this end of the world nonsense it seemed to be appropriate to dredge up the genius of the past.
The Second Coming
William Butler 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 the 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?
