Talking Back to Yeats

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: 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?

William Butler Yeats

"The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity." What more haunting words have ever been written?

Is it fate? Will things fall apart? Be torn apart? Are we witnessing the ascendancy of 'the worst'? It seems possible. How? Through the lack of conviction of the best. If passionate intensity is reserved for 'the worst', the result might as well be fated. Will 'the best' find their own intensity while the question is still an open one? Or will they save it for mourning after the dust has settled? Have no illusions: there really is a 'rough beast' slouching...but it will be up to others to determine whether this is really 'its hour come round at last'. It doesn't have to be.