The Second Coming

Reading Paul Krugman's column this morning, I was struck by the almost whispered reference to Yeats. I suddenly thought that perhaps we were at that terrifying point in the Yeatsian cycle of existence, where we will see the advent of the "rough beast." To many, the "rough beast" has already arrived – in the form of economic privation, paralyzing uncertainty and despair. In any event, it's worth recalling that prophetic ode today.

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: 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?