(photo care of deviantart)
Studying Yeats at online University, I've been pondering the-end-of-the-current-civilizations symbol of the sphinx in his poem "A Second Coming". This symbol i.e. the moving collective consciousness of all things connected to the falcon, or the bird of the enlightened one, moves to reincarnate as a 'contrary-Christ' (NOT an anti-christ) and represents a major change in civilization as we know it. Granted a change of massive chaos. However this poem attempts to personalize this symbol and its aftermath with my experiences of family life. Thus a babe, attempting to sleep, twists as chaos reigns, "teething and seething", the symbol of this change, and then the bliss-romance of all after dream time becomes the poems truth...
yeats' poem:
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?
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