Thanks to Marilyn Armstrong for sharing W.B. Yeats’ “The Second Coming” today.
THE SECOND COMING – William Butler Yeats
“The Second Coming” is a poem written by Irish poet W. B. Yeats in 1919, first printed in The Dial in November 1920, and afterwards included in his 1921 collection of verses Michael Robartes and the Dancer.
Yes, the hair stands up and one feels all hollow, like there’s not enough air. It is amazing to me (I am almost always far too ready to attach an identity to a poetic “abstraction) that I cannot identify the “rough beast.”
This is a double whammy because of Benjamin Britten’s use of the line “The ceremony of innocence is drowned” in his all too effective opera “The Turn of the Screw” about two children held in thrall by two ghosts. It is based on Henry James eponymous novella. Positively chilling.
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Carolyn, “Yes, the hair stands up and one feels all hollow, like there’s not enough air.” Have to go back and listen to the Britten and the James novella.
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One of the poems that leaves me shivering.
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Me too.
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