PatsFanInVa

For me, the last two lines of the first stanza say it all, because when the guy you voted for is president, you stop holding up signs and screaming and the bad guys start doing it. For others there's the air of apocalypticism and the world ending. For the conspiracy-minded and the religious, there are no end of terrible New World Order implications (and I have it on good authority that Blavatsky was influential with, if not Yeats, then certainly others among the Moderns.) Mere anarchy loosed upon the world, yeah for me the tea partiers again, and I bet anti-choicers can get behind the blood-dimmed tide and the ceremony of innocence.

And of course, there's the whole "birth o the beast" thing. Yeah, there'll be a second coming. But you won't like him. But we're the ones that rocked that cradle for 20 years, in the end.

And if you're just a plain old Pats fan stopping in for the first time, perhaps this was really only a hystrionic reaction to the development of professional American football, as evidenced by "the centre cannot hold."

At any rate, all, enjoy (or enjoy again) one of the gems of our language's literature, quoted and enjoyed decade after decade for its fusion of the mythic and the political.


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 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,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

- William Butler Yeats, 1919

Harry Boy

Let him up Martha
he can't breathe.

Harry Boy, 1932

__________________
Harry Boy (Genius)

In The Absence Of Law And Order Society Will Surely Destroy Itself