Deconstructing Yeats - The Second Coming...

'Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer'

 When he who commands and summons death cannot be heard above the din of destruction, death cannot be recalled.

'Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world' describes a time when nothing we take for granted can be relied upon, and creates an image of a failed world where the social restraints are off, and man's evil is set on full intensity.

Yeats, in his epic poem 'Second Coming' follows his disturbing 'The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned' with ‎'the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity' to describe, in my opinion, the complicit willingness of man to take part in his own destruction.

This world as we know it may never end, but man's existence upon it can, so perilously close have we come before that the specter of it no longer feels improbable.

'Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand.'Even in our final hour we have a need for things to make sense, and if we are killing our species we at least want it to count for something. 

'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.'

Out of our collective intelligence reason and understanding throws up an image of death, his presence so fallow and diseased as to cause desert where he walks.

'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?'

To end where conscience began, Jerusalem must be the final witness. Twenty centuries have indeed passed, and in irony I wonder, will Yeats be proven to be more than just a poet?

His final question begs a million more, not the least of which being the identity of our final destroyer.

To this writer the truth is plain to see yet cleverly hidden within these words; regardless of jurisdiction, whenever the moment arrives where we meet our end, it will be at our own hands.