BS: The Flavor of the Time....

Subject: RE: BS: The Flavor of the Time....
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 10 Nov 01 - 08:35 PM

This poem was used very effectively at the end of a pretty good book called The Year of the Comet by John Christopher published back in the 1950s, but set in the year 2000. He used it as a way of indicating that things in the world of the book, at the turn of the millenium, would never be the same again.

He got a lot of things pretty right too. It's been reprinted this year I gather. Worth reading.

It was a world where the old states were long dead. Now men owed allegiance to vast world-dominating business groups rather than to countries. But the conflicts were just as bitter and violent as in the old days of war between nations.

One thing this year has confirmed - those of us who were bloody minded enough to insist that the first year of thye 21st century was 2001 and not 2000 have been shown to have been only too right. And Yeats bleak poem fits into that.

Subject: RE: BS: The Flavor of the Time....
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 10 Nov 01 - 08:35 PM

This poem was used very effectively at the end of a pretty good book called The Day of the Comet by John Christopher published back in the 1950s, but set in the year 2000. He used it as a way of indicating that things in the world of the book, at the turn of the millenium, would never be the same again.

He got a lot of things pretty right too. It's been reprinted this year I gather. Worth reading.

It was a world where the old states were long dead. Now men owed allegiance to vast world-dominating business groups rather than to countries. But the conflicts were just as bitter and violent as in the old days of war between nations.

One thing this year has confirmed - those of us who were bloody minded enough to insist that the first year of thye 21st century was 2001 and not 2000 have been shown to have been only too right. And Yeats bleak poem fits into that.

Subject: RE: BS: The Flavor of the Time....
From: Gypsy
Date: 10 Nov 01 - 08:28 PM

As we are having the first rain of the year, the wind rattles the eucalyptus with a whistling sound....and the poem is eerily appropriate. Thanks, Amos.

Subject: RE: BS: The Flavor of the Time....
From: Linda Kelly
Date: 10 Nov 01 - 08:07 PM

Thanks Amos -I love W.B. Yeats and your observations are very accurate.

Subject: The Flavor of the Time....
From: Amos
Date: 10 Nov 01 - 08:03 PM

The notions of this old and honored piece of writing capture the feeling the last twelve-month has have left me with:

                                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?

William Butler Yeats, "Second Coming"

Regards,

A