Could it have started on line three?
Things
fall apart? The centre cannot hold:
getting
straight into the matter, beyond the images of widening
gyres, falcons and the
falconer?
Perhaps not, for Yeats writes a poem about revelations and
the second coming of salvation or damnation, with symbols and their
resonances providing the drive for the sturdy verse, verse that reads
so timely at present.
The
best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are
full of passionate intensity.
Though the words best and worst imply an
easy split, that begs the question 'who decides?'. The reader wonders
what Yeats would make of Donald Trump. Might these lines apply to
him?
Surely
some revelation is at hand;
Surely
the Second Coming is at hand.
Such revelations and possible comings are always at
hand as the symbols reverberate down the ages. Is it Albion, the
early name for Britain as seen by visitors to that white-cliffed
island, that Yeats sees in the desert?
A
shape with lion body and the head of a man
The poem was written not long after the Easter
Rebellion, the Russian Revolution and the horrors of the First World
War. As an Anglo-Irish cultural revivalist, Yeats poem carries
political resonances that deepen the echoes of its religious
soundings. The gyres are always widening. The cradle is always
rocking. And
The
twenty centuries of stony sleep
continue to a seasonal threat that is eternal, captured
in the marvellous closing lines
And
what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches
towards Bethlehem to be born?
The choice of the word slouches is terrific,
Yeats on top form, as he is throughout this exemplary poem.
Collected Poems: W.B. Yeats; Macmillan, London,
1952
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