What is the rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem?
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It is the beast in [b]Yeats's[/b] 1919 poem [i]“The Second Coming”[/i] – the most thoroughly pillaged piece of literature in English. e.g. [c=#BF0000]http://amzn.to/2ouGsVS [/c] The poem is a prophetic piece about the destruction of the twentieth century – the same things the [b]Mother of God[/b] warned about at [b]Fatima [/b]in 1917 and [b]Pope Leo XIII[/b] had a glimpse of in 1884 [c=#BF0000]http://bit.ly/2jsgQdn[/c] , [c=#BF0000]http://bit.ly/2k4Mfmc [/c] – 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. It’s the same form of despair we see in, say, [b]Ivan Karamazov[/b].....
[i][center]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: a waste of desert sand;
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
Wind 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?[/center][/i]
[center]~[i] "The Second Coming"[/i] by [b]W.B. Yeats[/b][/center]
[/center]It is the beast in [b]Yeats's[/b] 1919 poem [i]“The Second Coming”[/i] – the most thoroughly pillaged piece of literature in English. e.g. [c=#BF0000]http://amzn.to/2ouGsVS [/c] The poem is a prophetic piece about the destruction of the twentieth century – the same things the [b]Mother of God[/b] warned about at [b]Fatima [/b]in 1917 and [b]Pope Leo XIII[/b] had a glimpse of in 1884 [c=#BF0000]http://bit.ly/2jsgQdn[/c] , [c=#BF0000]http://bit.ly/2k4Mfmc [/c] – 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. It’s the same form of despair we see in, say, [b]Ivan Karamazov[/b].....
[i][center]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: a waste of desert sand;
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
Wind 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?[/center][/i]
[center]~[i] "The Second Coming"[/i] by [b]W.B. Yeats[/b][/center]
