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| Image courtesy of the Paris Review |
Over the decades, gentle reader, I've enjoyed reading poetry, and have, from time to time, made attempts to do my own work. Most of this musing went on during my service in Vietnam. There was always a need to fill in the three hours of picket duty, when doing so in the daylight made scribbling possible.
I was always careful to keep this practice well hidden. On the very few occasions when I was sprung, I always said I was writing a letter. I got away with it.
The product of this lifelong dabbling is an appendix in my memoir.
You really should buy it. I need the coffee money.
One of my favourite poets is W.B. Yeats.
Yeats was a Protestant/Agnostic, but his work has always resonated with this Catholic, possibly because of his subject matter, and his espousal of Irish nationalism. Easter 1916 captured the spirit of this nationalism as no sterile reading of the history could ever do.
Yeats was deeply into spiritualism and towards the end of his life, this became evident in his works. His "The Second Coming" is said to be a dirge for the decline of European civilisation. I reproduce it here, and ask the reader to consider the state of western (not just European) civilisation in 2024.
Yeats wrote it in 1919, at a time when the horrors of the Great War were fresh in the minds of most, but the rise of authoritarian fascism had not yet begun. The resurrection of these themes worldwide is apparent now (note Putin, Trump and Milei). A resurrected Yeats would probably have had something to write were he observing now.
Yeats should always he heard, not read, so here is a link to a reading.
And here is the text of the poem -
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
Surely some revelation is at hand;
The Second Coming!
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
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?
