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.

A Diane Wakoski Poem (a refuge from the submorons)

PREFACE: I long for the days when morons were part of the landscape. Alas it's submorons these days, like Christine O'Donnell who has not a clue about our country's founding documents AND doesn't mind public demonstrations of ignorance. Or Clarence Thomas' wife, lobbying AGAINST the administration's healthcare proposals; demanding Anita Hill apologize. What???

Posting a poem here in times of dangerous stupidity is neither effete nor is it a sign of hiding in denial.  I am not going to make an argument for the efficacy of art in bettering the citizenry or at least not right now.  Let's agree poetry is a a temporary refuge, a rose to smell before returning to battle.  And so:

I'm always amazed to remember I read poetry long before I wrote it. What a good citizen of the literate world I was! I've managed to hold onto about (guess) half my poetry books, despite nomadic tendencies, and so can track at least some early interests, one of which was Diane Wakoski.

She wrote one poem in which nuns' mouths form o's, like notes. If anyone knows the title, please tell me. In the meantime, here's a poem dipping and streaming back into itself with sonic repetition (blue, dew, demure).


To The Young Man Who Left The Flowers
On My Desk One April Afternoon

 I accepted them.
       It was the graceful
thing to do, even though I knew
they weren't meant for me:
Far, far too lovely they were—
half blue, wild tolling blue
as lucent and yielding as new
melon flesh and dew, dew on their lips
half demure, demure and elegant
white rose, sleeping beauties quiet
and masked against any beast.

I cannot say what they meant
to us all, coming at the time
when they did. It was love,
and we opened our hearts,
so much evil having recently skulked about.

_____
Diane Wakowski, from Virtuoso Literature for Two and Four Hands (Doubleday)