Three Monkeys Online

A Curious, Alternative Magazine

Yeats on the 58th American Presidential Election

WB Yeats on Donald Trump

While WB Yeats poem The Second Coming was written in 1919, after the horror of the First World War, and amidst the chaos of the developing Irish war of Independence, it remains fearfully appropriate to modern times.

The spirit of democracy demands that we congratulate the winner of an election, and accept the will of the majority, but the spirit of democracy is only ever respected by democractically minded people. Trump is the democratically elected President of the United States, well and good; let us never forget the hateful, bragging, bullying tactics that got him there.

The Second Coming – a poem 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?

Leave a Reply