The falcon cannot hear the falconer

 

My Modernity in Literature class begins today.  I've been teaching this course for about twelve years.

I change it a bit each time, and my students change, too.  

This year, all of them were born in the twenty-first century.  And, of course, the Pandemic has changed everything.

One poem we will read today is Yeats'  "The Second Coming" which he wrote in 1919:

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

 

   The Second Coming,  (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?