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While studying abroad at Stirling University in Scotland I began my love affair with insomnia. Inspired by a combination of the weather, the time change, the goddamn birds that chattered all damn night outside my window, and my bedroom that just drank up every last cheery drop of sunshine as soon as the sun broke over the horizon, I read a LOT of poetry at night to fill up the hours.
This was one I fell in love with. The first three lines were also the perfect epigraph to Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart.
And for anyone who didn't know where the title for the Angel episode Slouching Towards Bethlehem came from, well here you go.
The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats
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 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?
This was one I fell in love with. The first three lines were also the perfect epigraph to Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart.
And for anyone who didn't know where the title for the Angel episode Slouching Towards Bethlehem came from, well here you go.
The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats
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 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?
