My good friend Karen came to visit today and brought books of poetry for me to borrow. What a wonderful surprise. The only thing better than buying new books is having a friend loan you books she thinks you'll like. I spent most of the afternoon curled up with an anthology of “The Classic Hundred All-Time Favorite Poems” and found that I recognized many more of them than I imagined I might.I’ve been marking the ones that especially resonate with Post-it notes. I imagine my favorites may reveal a strange Rorschach interpretation of my inner psyche.
I thought I’d post one that I’ve heard the final lines to many times, but I didn’t know who wrote it and I’d never read the whole thing. It felt very fresh and eerily prescient, although the poem was written in 1919 and published in 1920. For those of you interested in dipping back into some poetry, enjoy.
The Second Coming
By William
1865-1939
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
