Happy B-day, Yeats: 'Second Coming' (poem)

Where are you going, sir? - Bethlehem. - But why, sir? - Don't worry about it.

.

Portrait by his father J. B. Yeats

William Butler Yeats (June 13, 1865–Jan. 28, 1939) is among the greats. Today is the commemoration of the Irish poet's birth.

Irish poet W. B. Yeats was a dramatist, writer, and literary critic who was one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature.

He was a driving force behind the Irish literary revival, and along with John Millington Synge and Lady Gregory founded the Abbey Theatre, serving as its chief during its early years.

Wm. Butler Yeats in 1923

He was awarded the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature and later served two terms as a senator of the Irish Free State.

A Protestant of Anglo-Irish descent, Yeats was born in Sandymount, Ireland. His father practiced law and was a successful portrait painter (painting him at right). He was educated in Dublin and London and spent his childhood holidays in County Sligo. 

• Swift's "A Modest Proposal"

Saint Issa on Roman cross

He studied poetry from an early age, when he became fascinated by Irish legends and the occult. His early poetry was influenced by John Keats, William Wordsworth, William Blake, and many others. More

He is remembered for many poems, perhaps most famous of which is this particularly poignant and prescient piece:

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 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?

How to convert Jews

Should Jews be forced to convert again?

• The Second Coming (poem)
• Yeats in Bedford Park, Chiswick's Local Web site
• W. B. Yeats; Dhr. Seven, Ashley Wells, Sheldon S. (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly Wiki edit