Yes.
Yes.
The context in which he wrote it is familiar (world war, rebellions, struggle):
The cyclicality of human history (Yeats goes for spirality in “widening gyre”), the Christian titling and references, the tension in the whole thing, word choices (darkness, nightmare, rough beast, blood-dimmed)… there’s despair in nearly every line.
His “surely some revelation is at hand” line is to me as unnerving today as any other part of this poem, because I see what revelations* we now face in the U.S. (the backlash against The 1619 Project and CRT, the as-yet-not-fully-or-publicly understood basis of Mitch McConnell’s complicity in wrongs against Americans, Cult45’s extensive grift including needless deaths during the COVID pandemic, climate hijacking and profiteering that probably will doom us, etc.).
How long can the people who buy in to what Cult45 is selling stand to consume their purchases? Doesn’t hate corrode the container it’s held in? (asking rhetorically, Doc, not expecting an answer here)
Perhaps the ouroboros will take itself apart just in time.
I was told by a teacher that if we’re not showing ourselves to be leading juicier, more fun / joyful lives , we’ll have a hard time getting people to choose better, less planet-killing and human-killing actions over profit and destruction. Hard work, considering…
… yeah, this.
*
I use the small “r” revelation here. I get it about The Second Coming and the Book of Revelation. My guess is he was leveraging these because people around him would have understood the shorthand; my sense is that he was unlikely to have been a strict, devout Christian believer. From Wikipedia:
Yeats was born in Sandymount, Ireland, and educated there and in London. He was a Protestant and member of the Anglo-Irish community. He spent childhood holidays in County Sligo and studied poetry from an early age, when he became fascinated by Irish legends and the occult. These topics feature in the first phase of his work, which lasted roughly until the turn of the 20th century. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, and its slow-paced and lyrical poems display debts to Edmund Spenser, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the poets of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. From 1900, his poetry grew more physical and realistic. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical theories of life. …
The man packed a lot of living into his years on this planet.
I have often wondered if he died at peace.
