I wasn’t planning to do my poem of the day in the morning, but I half-absently clicked open my daily missive from The Writer’s Almanac and read “The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats (read it here). I’m sure I have read this poem before at some point (high school?), but even if I hadn’t it would have felt familiar because lines and phrases have been plucked and repurposed in well-known books (Chinua Achebe, Joan Didion) and songs (Joni Mitchell).
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold
It’s amazing how just three lines can be so ominous. The whole poem is like that: powerful and heavy and mysterious.
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