subtitle: How old poems are still relevant..

Ignoring the News

I’ve pretty much turned away from “The News” these days. Every time I take a peek or give a listen, I feel my soul being crushed and my mind being numbed into oblivion. The sheer stupidity and the outright evil that has occurred and continues to occur daily in this country is unbearable. So…today I have turned to something more enriching.

As an English teacher, I tend to enjoy poetry. Not all poetry, mind you, but certain poems. I love Edgar Allan Poe’s poems, Sylvia Plath, some Robert Frost, e.e. cummings, Anne Sexton, Langston Hughes, T.S. Eliot…and others. I usually don’t love or even know much about this guy William Butler Yeats, but there is one poem he wrote that keeps running through my perpetually terrified mind: “The Second Coming,” written in 1919 just after World War I, when many folks thought the world almost ended.

And Now, A Poem

I don’t understand every word of it, but there are segments I feel pertain to the current situation we find ourselves in.

So…I know most people don’t have the patience for this type of stuff, but the parts that I focus on are these:

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed (let loose), and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned

(We no longer innocently believe that this country (world) is basically made up of “good people,” or that people in office may sometimes actually have the right intentions, good will, or any altruism whatsoever.)

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

The worst people in this country have risen to power through a series of “passionate outbursts” (of idiocy), while the best lack A SPINE or any passion to do anything useful (Democrats and/or thinking Independents).

And there is… “a rough beast, slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.”

Well, in this case, it has already been born. It lives on a toilet seat holding a phone at a pinkish-salmon colored golf club in West Palm Beach, and occasionally appears at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, once a place of at least some dignity. It has been a “second coming,” but not of Jesus. It is someone else.