Welcome back to the Daily Poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern.

Today is January 29th, 2020. And as I've mentioned the last two days, January 28th was the

anniversary of the death of William Butler Yates, one of the most important, the most preeminent

of all English-speaking poets, and certainly of the 20th century. He lived from 1865 to 1939. I wanted to read one more

poem for you, and I've read this poem before, but it's worth returning to because it's that

memorable, that important, and it is called the Second Coming. And almost all of my comments about

this poem are going to come from a few paragraphs that

Harold Bloom wrote about them in his, the best poems of the English language. When you're doing a

podcast almost every day about poetry, having great anthologies is useful. And he has some comments that I think

are worth sharing with you that would be just as good as well-known.

They'd be better than anything that I can share with you.

So first, as always, I'll read the poem.

It's the second coming, and here is how it goes.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon, cannot hear the falconer.

Things fall apart. The center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. The blood dim tide is loose 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 all 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

...