This Weekend Edition of Ecstatic features Danielle Van Meter
All is silence around me. The quiet feels like a facade amidst the chaos that roars around the planet. Peaceful music floats from the apartment next to mine. Meanwhile, wars have broken out and rainforests are on fire; I can do nothing about either except worry. Harold Bloom wrote that after the falling of the Twin Towers on 9/11, lines from Yeats’s poem, “The Second Coming” roused themselves from his subconscious. A generation later, the same poetry echoes in my mind as Palestinian and Israeli civilians face terror and death from the evil that lurks.
“The Second Coming” revives itself in my mind, because surely Yeats is right—this center can no longer hold. Children and grandparents are slain in the Middle East; Another man opens fire in a New England grocery store; police wrongfully shoot a woman in my city, and, myopically, my family dog dies. As wounds seem to rip open wider and deeper, Yeats speaks from one hundred years ago in a prophetic voice. “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” We scroll past the life events of our friends on social media between the faces of kidnapped babies. Indeed, the ceremony of innocence is drowned.
Yeats had a storied relationship with religion. He grew up with strictly Anglican grandparents and tried hard to be Catholic before pursuing theosophy, neo-Platonism, and the occult. His lifelong search for meaning, both inside churches and out, no doubt shaped his poetry, and his religious upbringing in Ireland formed Yeats’s internal mythopoeia about the coming of a spiritual being. Austin Warren described Yeats’s religious search as a need “less as a man than as a poet… he needed to believe that poetry is a form of knowledge and power, not of amusement.”
I sense this now in his poetry, as I attempt to psychically order the world’s chaos and come to grips with instances of violation and degradation on a grand scale. There is something poignant in reading these feelings so fittingly expressed by a poet over a century old. He was talking about post-war Europe; I am based in a world of AI, terrorism, and billionaires. Yet the vital tradition of literary relatability drums on in its ability to reveal the human spirit. This world is not so strange. It has been terrible before; it will be terrible again.
Yeats hints at this cyclical order in the first line of “The Second Coming” when he mentions the “widening gyre.” This gyre was his shorthand, referenced in many of his poems, to symbolize his belief that all things—from souls to civilizations—could be reduced to cycles and patterns. The chaos described in the first half of the poem, he intimates, still follows an order. While I would never wish to dismiss or diminish the individual suffering experienced by millions today, my belief in the cyclical nature of reality tends to align with Yeats here.
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