Things Fall Apart; the Centre Cannot Hold
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.
Like so many others, I have Yeatsy (of or relating to the Irish poet) thoughts today, as well as yeasty ones (characterized by or producing upheaval or agitation; in a state of turbulence, typically a creative or productive one). It’s a good day to invoke Irish writers and Irish sentiments, especially given the cancellation of our usual celebrations tomorrow. Yeasty and agitated times indeed.
My friend in Canada once wrote to me “When I feel like I am failing, struggling to keep it all together, I often think of a few lines from Yeats. The Second Coming. Not sure why, or what, they (and the poem) actually mean. I am not a religious man, but they bring me comfort. The first stanza perfectly reflects how I feel. The second speaks to the possibility that all will be okay, that I will be okay.”
I saw a reference online to The Second Coming as “our most pillaged poem.” I know it’s easy to take lines out of context and make them mean something the author didn’t intend. The first stanza, reproduced above, surely wasn’t about a microscopic creature bringing the world to its knees. Yet, it does feel somewhat like things fall apart and the centre cannot hold and Yeats gave us words for it. My friend was right. We don’t have to know what it all means.
His fellow countryman James Joyce gave us words, too. Words for another view of this. His character Stephen Daedalus, in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, was watching a young woman, enraptured.
She was alone and still, gazing out to sea; and when she felt his presence and the worship of his eyes her eyes turned to him in quiet sufferance of his gaze, without shame or wantonness. Long, long she suffered his gaze and then quietly withdrew her eyes from his and bent them towards the stream, gently stirring the water with her foot hither and thither. The first faint noise of gently moving water broke the silence, low and faint and whispering, faint as the bells of sleep; hither and thither, hither and thither; and a faint flame trembled on her cheek.
— Heavenly God! cried Stephen’s soul, in an outburst of profane joy.
Outbursts of profane joy on the one hand, mere anarchy on the other. Saying yes to both is the trick. Joseph Campbell wrote that “The warrior’s approach is to say yes to life, yea to all of it. If you say no to one little detail of your life, you’ve unraveled the whole thing. You have to say yes to the whole thing, including its extinction. That’s what’s known as ‘joyful participation in the sorrows of the world.’ ”
