Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold

 

Did you see Big Guy’s comments from his recent round of fundraisers?

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; – William Butler Yeats

*sigh* Do you have any idea how many times I’ve had to cite passages from The Second Coming in the 5 1/2 years of this blog’s existence? Who could have guessed that Yeats would be the unofficial poet laureate of the Obama years, and his poem of apocalypse the unofficial poem of the Occupation?

Another tweet from Barry’s last round of fund raising:

So why don’t I just go ahead and post the entire poem for our *ahem* reflection:

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?

 

Slouching towards Bethlehem, where things fall apart.

Ah yes, being “exceptional” is such a burden.