![]() ![]() Of course, twentieth-century history did turn more horrific after 1919, as the poem forebodes. It’s the same form of despair we see in, say, Ivan Karamazov. Its anxiety concerns the social ills of modernity: the rupture of traditional family and societal structures the loss of collective religious faith, and with it, the collective sense of purpose the feeling that the old rules no longer apply and there’s nothing to replace them. But the first stanza captures more than just political unrest and violence. Yeats began writing the poem in January 1919, in the wake of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and political turmoil in his native Ireland. (The closest it’s ever come is a nod on Lou Reed’s 1978 Live: Take No Prisoners: “The best lack all conviction,” Reed says to a heckler, “while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”) If a social scientist were to canvas all the writers and rock bands who’ve lifted its lines, not many would say they found the lines while reading The Collected Yeats or a vintage back issue of The Dial. ![]() The poem has never joined that panoply of standard high school texts, such as “Do Not Go Gentle,” “The Road Not Taken,” and “The Raven”-nor is it quoted in Dead Poets Society. Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,Īnd what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds. Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand Ī shape with lion body and the head of a man, The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out ![]() The best lack all conviction, while the worst The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere Things fall apart the centre cannot hold These references have created a feedback loop, leading ever more writers to draw from the poem for inspiration. (Perhaps Macbeth’s famous “sound and fury” monologue is a distant second.) Since Chinua Achebe cribbed Yeats’s lines for Things Fall Apart in 1958 and Joan Didion for Slouching Towards Bethlehem a decade later, dozens if not hundreds of others have followed suit, in mediums ranging from CD-ROM games to heavy-metal albums to pornography. “The Second Coming” may well be the most thoroughly pillaged piece of literature in English. (At least one blog got this subtlety right in a headline about the 2012 election cycle: “Romney slouching toward GOP nomination.”) It’s actually a terrifying sight: the poem’s narrator intuits that the beast is coming to wreak some untold havoc. Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” the 1919 poem from which the phrase originates: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”īut Yeats’s beast, it must be said, isn’t deteriorating or dying in its slouching, as the many references to the phrase would have you believe rather, it slouches in steady, dedicated progress toward a goal. The only thing not doing any slouching these days is the “rough beast” in W. A casual reader might wonder why the nations of the world have such terrible posture is it that the earth is slouching towards bedlam? Have things fallen apart? ![]() Harris, an English professor, claims we’re Slouching Towards Gaytheism. An undated photo of Yeats by the Bain News Service.Ī recent Russia Today headline suggests that Europe is “slouching towards anxiety and war.” According to the title of Robert Bork’s latest best seller, the United States is Slouching Towards Gomorrah. ![]()
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