Sometimes when I am playing DOTA and we are handed the ass-whupping of our lives I start typing crap on the chat function .. things like " the center cannot hold" and "the blood dimmed tide is loose" and such. I assumed that it was common knowledge that I am quoting William Butler Yeats' "The Second Coming" ... from chatting with some people I found out that it wasn't quite common knowledge. Allow me then, to enlighten you. Here is the poem :
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: 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?
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Some say that the poem refers to the second coming from the bible, in which a great battle will be fought and that ultimately good will prevail. If that is the case here, the authour raises doubt about who will win. Another theory is that the poem symbolically represents the awakening of paganism which then tries to take over Christianity. In that case"The sleeping monster" here refers to paganism and how it tries to become dominant again. Doesn't matter what it means, like most good poems, each phrase here has it's own meaning for different people and how it will be interpreted depends on who is reading it.
Still gives me the chills to read this .. especially with the prophetic air that it has. |
