The Second Coming

Yesterday we sat around bemoaning about creationists, Sarah Palin, and overall nut cases we keep hearing from, when I was reminded of the lines from this poem: " The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity". Yeats, being Yeats, makes this poem nicely dark and brings forth such a vivid imagery of hopelessness.

It somehow feels nice to think that even back then the world was full of madmen shouting hoarse, and yet the world moved ahead and became better overall. I suppose reason does have some impact.

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?