A bit of Yeats for the House GOPers:

[DemoTex]

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
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?

[pangaia]

1. You expect a GOPer to understand this?

[DemoTex]

3. Actually, no.

Just posting for our choir!

[pangaia]

6. As a member of the choir,

Thanks for giving me something to ponder this evening..

[enough]

4. Really. Words from a time when words had meaning. (nt)

[CaliforniaPeggy]

2. I think this is very appropriate and beautiful, my dear DemoTex...

Thank you!

A moment of beauty and sanity in the midst of all of this...

[DemoTex]

5. Thanks, Peg.

Bad times are upon us.

[Avalux]

7. Ted Cruz?

Seriously though, I haven't read that for years....thanks for posting it.

[Volaris]

15. OK, that made me laugh.

"What did you do Ray?"

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

8. Yeah, I thought of that one myself this morning.

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.

Kinda says it all.

[DemoTex]

9. Indeed

I'd distill it further to the last two lines:
"The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."

But, perhaps, Ecclesiastes says it best: "There is nothing new under the sun."

[mahina]

10. To a Friend whose Work has come to Nothing

To a Friend whose Work has come to Nothing


NOW all the truth is out,
Be secret and take defeat
From any brazen throat,
For how can you compete,
Being honour bred, with one
Who, were it proved he lies,
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbours’ eyes?
Bred to a harder thing
Than Triumph, turn away
And like a laughing string
Whereon mad fingers play
Amid a place of stone,
Be secret and exult,
Because of all things known
That is most difficult.

No, wait, that was for us when Bush stole the Presidency, for the second time.

[philly_bob]

11. For the first time, I understand the falcon line:

"The falcon cannot hear the falconer"

The teabaggers do not respond to their corporate bosses.

[Hekate]

12. That's always been a gorgeous poem, and a terrifying one

Written in 1919 after the War to End All Wars wrought so much destruction that a poet could discern the madness still ahead in the 20th century...

And here we are.

[DemoTex]

13. And, then there was Wilfred Owen .. 1917

The old lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro Patria mori.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

14. I've always thought that this line from Wilfred Owen was so true and so tragic.

And yet the young people march off to war, god knows why.

[Hekate]

16. Remember when Laura Bush was to have a gathering of poets at the WH?

When she found out that some planned to bring poems about war, she wanted to cancel (I don't remember if she ultimately did) because, she said, people do not write poems about war, so she was not going to have any of that at her luncheon.

What a blind and ignorant woman. I thought of Wilfred Owen, but also that poets have been writing about war and its devastation and sorrow since before the Greeks laid down the dactylic hexameter.

Thanks for bringing in Yeats, btw; he's one of my favorites.

[freshwest]

17. Thanks. I've quoted this before:

If man were immortal he could be perfectly sure of seeing the day when every thing in which he had trusted should betray his trust, and, in short, of coming eventually to hopeless misery.

He would break down, at last, as every good fortune, as every dynasty, as every civilization does. In place of this we have death.

~ Charles Sanders Pierce

A comment where I found it read somewhat like this:

Death can be seen as a blessing. One can still hold onto one's ideals and beliefs and not become embittered by the way life treats that which one held so dear.

Of course we can take one path or another. Either road will be equally difficult.

[bemildred]

18. Life is a trapdoor function, you can only start over, you can't go back.

We are finite beings in a finite world, and there are good reasons for that.