If you're looking for a literary way to celebrate St. Patrick's Day this weekend, Scena Theatre is staging readings of three plays by William Butler Yates on Sunday. Purgatory, At the Hawk's Well, and The Death of Cuchulain will be read at the H Street Playhouse at 7 pm. Tickets are $20. I've always liked Yeats, even if this photo, on a poster of Irish writers at Moran's, always reminded me of Dan Akroyd.
Now that I've low-browed Yeats, let me offer one of his best known poems:
The Second Coming
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?
Ney Yeats! This is not another Troy, hear me! Now let me get back to fumbling in my greasy till.
Posted by: NorthernOutlaw | May 11, 2012 at 11:48 PM
This reads like one of those robocomments seeking to sell Nikes, but more clever.
Posted by: MB | May 13, 2012 at 11:35 PM