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?
This poem confuses me as it seems that there is no real iambic pentameter with a lose meter. I find it hard to spot anything that rhymes and it feels violent. What are the things that are ‘falling apart; the centre cannot hold’? I am guessing that it is the state of the world and I take the happening of World War 1 into consideration here- the world did fall apart. ‘Anarchy is loosed upon the world’ I link to the falcon out of hearing of its falconer and on its own flight path. I am not sure what the falcon might be a metaphor for; maybe human kind or religion or the state of the world?
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| Life in the Gyre, Valerie O'Flynn, 1996. |
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?
This poem confuses me as it seems that there is no real iambic pentameter with a lose meter. I find it hard to spot anything that rhymes and it feels violent. What are the things that are ‘falling apart; the centre cannot hold’? I am guessing that it is the state of the world and I take the happening of World War 1 into consideration here- the world did fall apart. ‘Anarchy is loosed upon the world’ I link to the falcon out of hearing of its falconer and on its own flight path. I am not sure what the falcon might be a metaphor for; maybe human kind or religion or the state of the world?
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