The Second Coming

With so much war, corruption, and governmentally sanctioned injustice on the rise over the course of the last few years-- with increasing economic distress, genocide, natural calamity, and now with the deadly events of the past few days in Gaza, this poem, "The Second Coming," in early drafts, entitled "The Second Birth," seems timely as we begin to taste the horror necessary to understand these words fully.

Written by William Butler Yeats in 1919, in the aftermath of World War I, I imagine that the cycling of destruction into potential awakening and rebirth must have been a felt visceral experience. Without idealization or illusion regarding the cycle of birth, here instead we find a humbled wretched being or "beast" trudging toward Bethlehem to awaken or be born from a self-generated nightmare and ignorance; we must feel pity and compassion for him, for he is us.

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 around 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?

--W.B. Yeats

La Segunda Venida

Girando y girando en el creciente espiral
El halcón no puede oír al halconero;
Las cosas se deshacen; el centro no puede sostenerse;
La simple anarquía se suelta en el mundo,
La marea oscurecida por la sangre se suelta,
Y en todas partes
La ceremonia de la inocencia queda ahogada;
Los mejores carecen de toda convicción,
Mientras que los peores
Están llenos de apasionada intensidad.

Seguro que una revelación está en puerta;
Seguro que la Segunda Venida está en puerta.
¡La Segunda Venida! Apenas han salido esas palabras
Cuando una vasta imagen del Spiritus Mundi
Me agobia la vista: en algún lugar de las arenas del desierto
Una forma con cuerpo de león y cabeza de hombre,
Una mirada en blanco y despiadado como el sol,
Está moviendo sus muslos lentos,
Mientras a su alrededor
Dan vueltas las sombras de los pájaros indignados del desierto.
Las tinieblas descienden de nuevo, pero ahora sé
Que veinte siglos de sueño pedregoso
Se revolvieron en pesadilla por culpa de una cuna mecedora,
¿Y qué bestia tan áspera, llegado su hora por fin,
Camina con los hombros caídos hacia Belén para nacer?

--W.B. Yeats (Traducción por Lorena Wolfman)