Postmodern Society

The Second Coming

 

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 Bethlehem to be born?

 

-- William Butler Yeats

 

1.  Veith, Gene Jr.  Postmodern Times:  A Christian Guide to Contemporary Thought and Culture. Wheaton:  Crossway Books,   1994

2.  Powell, Jim.  Postmodernism for Beginners.  New York:  Writers and Readers Publishing, 1998.

 

 

 

Rev. David D. Reedy 2003