the centre cannot hold...

Jeanette Winterson's a fantastic writer, as I've said here before. Since I write on my own little site, seems to have done the same. I am not fit to sharpen this woman's pencils, but I like to think it's a sign that I know what's good that I know she is. A bit on www.jeanettewinterson.com about the state of things in this country, and thus the world these days, and she posts their a poem by Yeats.

Whether Bush is the thing slouching or the anarchy is ours today is beyond the point, I guess. You can read it and let if inform the state of things today, or let our current mess give a bit more meaning to the poem. Either way, things certainly do seem to fall apart...

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 the 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.
What rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Strange to think that the second coming would probably make much of this country very happy...blood-dimmed tide and all.