This week's poem is an old friend. More than any other poem, it has stuck with me through my philosophical evolutions over the years. There's such a deep truth to it, and yet, in its pristine state, it is hauntingly beautiful. I bring it up this week because it came up once again in an article I was writing this week. It is the perfect example of Yeats’ talent for mixing occultic, poetic, mythological and religious imagery into something hauntingly modern. I can smell the influence of Nietzsche in this one.
I can still picture where I was when I learned it off — walking through a field on my 40-day camping trek along the southwest coast of Ireland back in 2020 (I wanna say it was on the Sheep's Head peninsula?).
In my 20s, I was struck more by the second stanza with the Second Coming of this antichrist/sphinx figure emerging from the collective unconscious — there's no finer vision of the crisis of Nihilism as Nietzsche diagnoses it with the death of God.
These days it's the first stanza I think about: the widening gyre (a gyre being the circle the falcon flies in — I can see the buzzards flying in their gyres, high in the sky, when I look out my door on a good day), the centre that can't hold and the consequences of that. There's a book gloss of Deleuzian assemblages, Nietzsche Nihilism and social media era narrative fragmentation I could write reflecting on these lines. I'm still not sure I share Yeats’ fear, but the fear of the fear still scares me.
And then, of course, there's that couplet which ends the first stanza, which, 105 years on, captures the state of our epistemic commons better than any contemporary commentary. I will be writing a piece soon on the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle, which runs parallel to this couplet.
The Second Coming by W.B. 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?
Good Halloween poem in its own way.