Yeats for today

[handmade34]

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.

[Dogmudgeon]

1. Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

In politics.

On the Internet.

In science and in the arts.

Here at DU.

Everywhere else.

--d!

[bemildred]

2. 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?

-- William Butler Yeats, January 1919

[handmade34]

3. yes indeed

what... slouches...to be born?

[bemildred]

8. "Mere anarchy" seems a good bet, and quite a lot of it.

Otherwise it is hard to predict. I do think we have the privilege of witnessing the end of an great historical period. Things quite clearly cannot go on as they are, or even close to as they are.

[saltpoint]

4. I say let's have less of those smarty-pants poets from Ireland and more

updates on OctoMom.

[JCMach1]

5. Yeats is soooo arrogant after all...

[saltpoint]

6. LOL!

[saltpoint]

7. At the "What rough beast / Its hour come 'round at last" part, I got a visual

of Jim Bunning blathering on the floor of the U.S. Senate this week.