And now for some Yeats

[etumukutenyak]

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 convictions, 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?


Ah, he had a way with words. Comes of being Irish, so it does. ;-) Although he was born in Dublin, he said (somewhere) that Sligo was very important to him. All I can say is, he never was in Killashandra, then. :-P ;-)

No, I'm not biased at all, am I hawkwing_lb?? :-D

Comments

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

Cavan's the wrong end of the country for Sligo!

Now me, I couldn't say where dear William Butler was born. I do know he was raised in Sligo, educated in England, and in later life spent significant amounts of time at Lady Gregory's estates in Sligo. He married and lived near Ben Bulben head - some of his poems, such as Meditations in Time of Civil War, describe his home a little.

One of his early poems, Innisfree - written while he was living in London - is an ode to an island in Sligo.

This is what happens when you subject impressionable young people to intensive poetry education. I can discourse at length upon certain of WB Yeats' poems, and know a little about the man himself.

(I nicked the words in my current icon from Easter 1916)

I don't know, are you biased? I really couldn't tell... :-)