Second Tuesday after Pentecost
Tuesday is review day on the blog.We have so far reviewed books, movies, music, and architecture. Last night when I went to bed, I wasn't sure what I wanted to review today. Some odd circumstances of this morning led me to want to review William Butler Yeats's (1865-1939) poem, The Second Coming. Yeats (pronounced "Yates") can be seen as the leader of the Irish Renaissance in literature in the late 19th and early 20th century. Other great Irish writers of the time include Oscar Wilde, J.M. Synge, and James Joyce. Yeats's poems are many and varied, his life longer than most of those in his time period. I'll resist my urge to contextualize everything. Here's the poem.
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 the sands of the desert
A shape with a 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
The poem came to mind as this morning I was reading an editorial in the New York Times about the current irrational gyrations in the stock market. The author said, "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." The phrase has become so commonplace that it no long needs attribution.
Two titles of books I've read have come from this poem. The literary historian Nathan Scott wrote a brilliant analysis of 20th century European and American literature entitled The Broken Center. The line from Yeats's poem begins the book. Nathan Scott himself was an amazing story. An African-American born of poor parents in Detroit, he went on to get a Ph.D. in literature at Columbia University in New York, while also taking courses at the adjacent Union Theological Seminary. His teachers included Lionel Trilling and Jaques Barzun at Columbia and Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich at Union. Works of all of these thinkers are in the bookshelves behind me as I write this. Scott went on to establish the new scholarly discipline of Religion and Literature. He taught at the University of Chicago for two decades before founding the department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia.
The other book is Peter deVries novel Slouching Toward Bethlehem. I've read it but don't remember much. Much better were two other of his novels, The Mackeral Plaza and The Blood of the Lamb. All of deVries's novels are deeply theological. I have used a scene from The Blood of the Lamb as a sermon illustration. I am sure there are other book titles and innumerable quotations from Yeats's poem.
Another thing on the news and in the papers today that prompted me to write about this poem is the majority opinion written by Supreme Court Judge Neil Gorsuch in the LGBT+ case that the court decided yesterday. While some of the justices say that laws should be interpreted on the basis of what the lawmakers were thinking as they wrote the laws, that is to say, the original intent of the lawmakers, Judge Gorsuch thinks that laws should be interpreted only on the basis of what they actually say. This plays into the modernist--post-modernist debate, which I won't go into at this point, other than to say that post-modernists think that we cannot know an author's original intent. Whether we like it or not, we are giving a document, in this case the Civil Rights Act of 1964, our own interpretation, not its authors' interpretation.
So, I'm not going to contextualize The Second Coming. Here is some meaning I draw from the poem. Please draw your own. The first stanza portrays a world whose basic human values have fallen apart, a world whose greatest minds are marginalized, while those of little understanding rule over a crumbling descent into anarchy.
The second stanza references the coming of Christ twenty centuries ago and looks toward a second coming, but not as usually envisioned. A lumbering sphinx looking figure will slowly cross the desert to Bethlehem. Is the beast a devouring apocalyptic monster. I think most critics see it that way. I'm not sure. I have been there, in the literal sense. I've been just west of the Nile where the Spinx has sat in all his massive glory for 3,500 years. He does not look like a monster to me. The beast in him is tamed by the head and the brain of a wise and serene ancient who has seen it all.
I once went to the Sound and Light show at the Pyramids. The audience and the lights face directly at the Sphinx with the three great pyramids behind. The deep voiced announcer tells us that the Sphinx and the pyramids had already been there for 1,200 years when Moses and the Israelites were there. The Sphinx had sat there for 2,200 years when Alexander the Great was there. He had been there for 2,500 years when Cleopatra was there. Joseph and Mary and the baby Jesus fled to Egypt 30 years after Cleopatra's death. The Sphinx had been sitting there for 4,300 years when Napoleon stood before it, and one of his soldiers cut off part of its nose. The sphinx had been there for 4,600 years when Marianne and I stood before it.
I have also been several times to Bethlehem. I have stood at the spot in a cave under the Church of the Nativity where tradition has it that Christ was born. There those gathered always sing, "O Come, All Ye Faithful." The last words are, "O Come Let Us Adore Him, Christ the Lord." The Sphinx is far older, and in the Egyptian mind, far wiser than the Magi.
In my interpretation the Sphinx slouches toward Bethlehem, like the wise men, to be born anew after its 4,600 years of accumulating the wisdom that has passed by it. The Sphinx slouches toward Bethlehem to adore Him, Christ the Lord.
Faithfully,
Christian
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