The Second Coming

      

          I have been haunted by “The Second Coming,” written by William Butler Yeats at the beginning of the last century, for a week. In so many ways, it feels, “the centre cannot hold” in 2021. Politically, the gyre widens every day—we have lost the sense that we are all pulling for the same ideals, even if we do not agree on the paths to get there. The worse are full of passionate intensity, the centre is missing. The climate crisis continues to grow. The pandemic is not over; we have not begun to reckon with the fall out economically or socially while we argue over masks and vaccinations. The words I hear at school echo this falling apart—students cannot regulate themselves, children are feral after two years at home, away from the order of the classroom. Mere anarchy.

                 This afternoon, I left the house, stepping into a wild and windy afternoon. There had been one downpour. Clouds suggested that another might be on the way. I tucked my poncho into my bag. The sky was huge and grey, ocean driven clouds. The streets were slippery with fallen leaves. It all swirled around me as I began to walk, caught up in the whirling world, my mind matching the air around me. Then, the walk settled in. The rhythm of my steps, matching the beat of my heart. My mind followed my feet, settling down. Where is my center—the center I can hold onto? My feet. The earth. The cycle of the seasons, thinking about how the leaves flying around my head would soon settle onto my garden beds, break down, become next season’s greens and tomatoes.  How do I bring this center into the widening gyre of the world, as I am called to do, every day, in the classroom? Because the poem shifts, in the second stanza, towards a Second Coming, perhaps, out of all of this violence, a second chance to do thing correctly, to have a second birth in Bethlehem, a second savior that just might, this time, pull the world out of chaos? Surely, something good must come out of this?

     Yeats, like me, is not sure—the monster, slouching towards us, feels pitiless and violent, hot and dry as the sun or a wildfire. Darkness follows it. Hope is not a guarantee. It was not in 1919. For those of us trying to hold the center, on the front lines of this anarchy, it is not in 2021.

 

Be kind.

 

The Second Coming 

BY 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 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?