Sarah Sarai's Second Coming: tale of a penitent swift and willful

If it weren't for a quick catch by Dan Coffey, Associate Professor & Subject Librarian, Social Sciences & Humanities, Iowa State University, I'd be skulking in the blogosphere as we speak.

A simple typo isn't typically cause for recrimination, of course, and even a complex typo is forgivable now and then. Alas, yestereday I was writing about "idiocy," at least in part, and confused a poet born in London in 1757 with one born in Dublin in 1865. (See below for link.)


As I wrote I remembered slamming shut T.S. Eliot's The Sacred Wood some years ago on reading his comparison of Blake  ("only a poet of genius") with Dante ("a classic"). How could Eliot consider the alleged author of "The Second Coming" mere genius?  And why was a little voice crying "Yeats! Sarah, Yeats!"?

"Wake up, Sarah," the little voice urged, gripping my hand even as it slipped from the railing; and so I pressed Publish Post for "Blake's The Second Coming: the submorons haven't won." My saving grace and/or stunt cushion is having smart friends who stem rebellions of my wayward fingers, swift and willful; and since I admit of and correct same, and since this is my blog, I maintain (and hereby certify) I am not a submoron. Just a bad wizard who minutes later disappeared her mistake.

By the way, even years ago, I knew Eliot might not be wrong, but then again, who can ever be sure of such things. In high school I memorized Blake on my own. I've always felt that affection.

To read Eliot's essay on Blake, on Bartleby, click on this sentence.

To read yesterday's posting, now titled Yeats' The Second Coming: the submorons haven't won, click this sentence.

Yeats' The Second Coming: the submorons haven't won

At least ten times in the past twenty-four hours I've seen this poem referenced. By old and young. Hip and merely groovy. Overly educated and educated. (Regardless of your diploma or degree, if a line from Yeats "The Second Coming" is something you've held, you're educated.)

And this collective confidence in our knowledge means that for all the idiotic shouts and misquotes spewing from right-wing media mouths, the submorons haven't won. And we can't believe they have.

Because Yeats is part of the canon, I don't mean to imply the submorons are synonymous with pop culture. Pop is as much a part of who I am as classics, the canon, the old and that's true of many I admire and I believe it's fine and adds to cultural richness. I'm saying the submorons, in their Clarence Thomas-like lack of curiosity or interest in learning more of our world, do not know what is true and authentic. (My post on Diane Wakowski offers a little more on the topic of submorons.) (My post on this post, Sarah Sarai's Second Coming: tale of a penitant swift and willful, reveals an embarrassing erratum, now fixed.)

The fabulous news is not everyone's lost their instinct for the authentic.

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 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 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, 1865-1931
His Nobel link.

Illustraton:  William Blake, 1757-1827
An interesting link from the Tate.