THE SECOND COMING
W.B. Yeats (1919)
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?
Poem written in the wake of WWI by an Irishman.
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Federico Garcia Lorca
A poet, activist, and homosexual under dictator Generalissimo Francisco Franco's reign. Lorca was kidnapped, tortured, and assassinated in 1936. Franco was a despot, insisting that Spain remain an island onto itself, no one allowed to leave no one allowed to come. He lots of other bad stuff like torturing people and kidnapping them and censoring like everything. But you can read about it.
Federico Garcia Lorca's plays (and poetry) and his TIME stand upon a political crisis leading to familial crises which bring about crises within the individual.
