“SLOUCHING TOWARDS BETHLEHEM”
The world mourns the passing of Jimmy Carter at age 100. We were blessed to go to his 100th birthday party at the Fox Theater earlier this year, and we give thanks for his life and for his presidency. It stands in stark contrast to the incoming presidency of Donald Trump, and my blog today is about that time that looms before us.
As we approach the beginning of the apocalyptic second Trump presidency, I am drawn to the 105 year old poem “The Second Coming,” by William Butler Yeats. Yeats was an Irish poet, born in 1865 in County Dublin, and he was an Irish nationalist. He wrote this poem in 1919, at the end of World War I, and also in the middle of the flu pandemic of 1917-1919 which killed millions around the world. Indeed, his pregnant wife almost died from the pandemic. Yeats meant the poem as a warning about the breakdown of European civilization, but as with all good art, it has lasted and resonates in all ages. Yeats won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. Yeats died in France in 1935. On one of our trips to Ireland, we visited St. Columba’s Church in County Sligo because Caroline’s and my first church was named after St. Columba, the patron saint who brought Christianity to Scotland. Susan also wanted to see Yeats’ grave at St. Columba’s Church, and we were impressed to stand in that space beside Yeats’ grave.
I first encountered this poem in a British Literature course in 1967 at Southwestern at Memphis (now Rhodes College), and it has stayed with me ever since. I’ll have more to say on the Trumpster, but for now, as 2024 draws to a close, here is my feeling about the coming Trump administration.
“The Second Coming”
By William Butler Yeats
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?