{"id":84439,"date":"2015-04-07T13:30:04","date_gmt":"2015-04-07T17:30:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=84439"},"modified":"2015-04-07T13:23:53","modified_gmt":"2015-04-07T17:23:53","slug":"no-slouch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/04\/07\/no-slouch\/","title":{"rendered":"No Slouch"},"content":{"rendered":"

The widening gyre of heavy-handed allusions to Yeats\u2019s \u201cThe Second Coming.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\"yeats\"<\/a>

An undated photo of Yeats by the Bain News Service.<\/p><\/div>\n

A recent Russia Today<\/em> headline<\/a> suggests that Europe is \u201cslouching towards anxiety and war.\u201d According to the title of Robert Bork\u2019s latest best seller<\/a>, the United States is Slouching Towards Gomorrah.<\/em> A new book by W.\u2009C. Harris, an English professor, claims we\u2019re Slouching Towards Gaytheism<\/em><\/a>. A casual reader might wonder why the nations of the world have such terrible posture; is it that the earth is slouching towards bedlam<\/a>? Have things fallen apart?<\/p>\n

The only thing not doing any slouching these days is the \u201crough beast\u201d in W. B. Yeats\u2019s \u201cThe Second Coming,\u201d the 1919 poem from which the phrase originates: \u201cAnd what rough beast, its hour come round at last,\u2009\/\u2009Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?\u201d<\/p>\n

But Yeats\u2019s beast, it must be said, isn\u2019t deteriorating or dying in its slouching, as the many references to the phrase would have you believe; rather, it slouches in steady, dedicated progress toward a goal. It\u2019s actually a terrifying sight: the poem\u2019s narrator intuits that the beast is coming to wreak some untold havoc. (At least one blog got this subtlety right in a headline about the 2012 election cycle: \u201cRomney slouching toward GOP nomination.\u201d<\/a>)<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Second Coming\u201d may well be the most thoroughly pillaged piece of literature in English. (Perhaps Macbeth\u2019s famous \u201csound and fury\u201d monologue is a distant second.) Since Chinua Achebe cribbed Yeats\u2019s lines for Things Fall Apart <\/em>in 1958 and Joan Didion for Slouching Towards Bethlehem <\/em>a decade later, dozens if not hundreds of others have followed suit, in mediums ranging from CD-ROM games to heavy-metal albums to pornography. These references have created a feedback loop, leading ever more writers to draw from the poem for inspiration. But how many of them get it right? <\/p>\n

Here\u2019s \u201cThe Second Coming\u201d in full:<\/p>\n

\n

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.<\/p>\n

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: a waste of desert sand;
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
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The poem has never joined that panoply of standard high school texts, such as \u201cDo Not Go Gentle,\u201d \u201cThe Road Not Taken,\u201d and \u201cThe Raven\u201d\u2014nor is it quoted in Dead Poets Society<\/em>. (The closest it\u2019s ever come is a nod on Lou Reed\u2019s 1978 Live: Take No Prisoners<\/em>: \u201cThe best lack all conviction,\u201d Reed says to a heckler, \u201cwhile the worst are full of passionate intensity.\u201d) If a social scientist were to canvas all the writers and rock bands who\u2019ve lifted its lines, not many would say they found the lines while reading The Collected Yeats <\/em>or a vintage back issue of The Dial<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Yeats began writing the poem in January 1919, in the wake of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and political turmoil in his native Ireland. But the first stanza captures more than just political unrest and violence. Its anxiety concerns the social ills of modernity: the rupture of traditional family and societal structures; the loss of collective religious faith, and with it, the collective sense of purpose; the feeling that the old rules no longer apply and there\u2019s nothing to replace them. It\u2019s the same form of despair we see in, say, Ivan Karamazov.<\/p>\n

Of course, twentieth-century history did turn more horrific after 1919, as the poem forebodes. The narrator suggests something like the Christian notion of a \u201csecond coming\u201d is about to occur, but rather than earthly peace, it will bring terror. As for the slouching beast, the best explanation is that it\u2019s not a particular political regime, or even fascism itself, but a broader historical force, comprising the technological, the ideological, and the political. A century later, we can see the beast in the atomic bomb, the Holocaust, the regimes of Stalin and Mao, and all manner of systematized atrocity.<\/p>\n

Achebe\u2019s Things Fall Apart<\/em>, the first book to borrow a line from \u201cThe Second Coming,\u201d cleverly inverts the poem: here African civilization is the one under threat, and the rough beast is the West. Achebe\u2019s Nigerian warrior faces exile from his village and pressure from Christian missionaries who threaten the tribal way of life; he commits suicide.<\/p>\n

But the title essay in Didion\u2019s Slouching Towards Bethlehem<\/em> goes one better: even its basic structure mirrors that of the poem. Didion stands in the same position as Yeats\u2019s narrator, describing a social disaster, feeling the center start to give out. Didion reported the piece from San Francisco, \u201cwhere the social hemorrhaging was showing up,\u201d \u201cwhere the missing children were gathering and calling themselves \u2018hippies.\u2019\u2009\u201d She tells of the disoriented youth she met there, including a five-year-old named Susan whose mother feeds her acid and peyote. She muses that the hippies are dealing with \u201csociety\u2019s atomization,\u201d for which their parents are responsible. \u201cAt some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing,\u201d she writes.<\/p>\n

In the wake of Didion\u2019s success, publishers have come to realize they can apply Yeats\u2019s lines to pretty much any book that documents confusion and disarray. Thus Elyn Saks\u2019s 2008 memoir, The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness<\/em>, concerning her bout with schizophrenia. Though these four words from Yeats surely resonate with Saks\u2019s feelings, the \u201ccenter\u201d in question here isn\u2019t the moral authority of the Western world, it\u2019s one person\u2019s sense of stability. The trend has held for art books (David Gulden\u2019s photography collection The Centre Cannot Hold<\/em>), politics (The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies<\/em>), alternate history (American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold<\/em>), popular history (A Blood-Dimmed Tide: The Battle of the Bulge by the Men Who Fought It<\/em>), reportage (A Blood-Dimmed Tide: Dispatches from the Middle East<\/em>), religion (The Second Coming: A Pre-Mortem on Western Civilization<\/em>), international affairs (Slouching Towards Sirte: NATO\u2019s War on Libya and Africa<\/em>), right-wing moral hectoring (Slouching Toward Gomorrah<\/em>), memoir (Slouching Toward Adulthood<\/em>), and even humor (Slouching Towards Kalamazoo<\/em>; Woody Allen\u2019s Mere Anarchy<\/em>). It seems that for every cogent allusion (Northrop Frye\u2019s Spiritus Mundi<\/em>, anyone?) there are a dozen falcons that truly can\u2019t hear the falconer.<\/p>\n

Connections to Yeat\u2019s original are even more tenuous when his lines crop up in comics, pulp novels, TV, and music. The phrase \u201cwidening gyre\u201d alone has been an inexhaustible resource. In a 2009 Batman comic by that name, written by the film director Kevin Smith, the superhero\u2019s girlfriend nicknames him \u201cDeedee,\u201d in reference to their first night together (\u201cwe hit double digits\u201d). Their bliss is cut short when the villain, Onomatopoeia, cuts the woman\u2019s throat open, and Batman wets his pants. Mere anarchy indeed.<\/p>\n

Widening Gyre<\/em> is also the title of a 1973 novel by Robert Parker in which a detective has to retrieve an explicit sex tape of a senatorial candidate\u2019s wife. (\u201cBut getting back the tape of the lady\u2019s X-rated indiscretion,\u201d reads Parker\u2019s Web site<\/a>, \u201cis a nonstop express ride to trouble\u2014trouble that is deep, wide and deadly.\u201d) And let\u2019s not overlook the \u201cWidening Gyre\u201d episodes of Andromeda<\/em>, Sons of Anarchy<\/em>, and Ben 10: The Ultimate Alien<\/em>; or the album<\/a> Widening Gyre<\/em> by the Irish folk band Altan; or the downloadable RPG<\/a>, featuring \u201ca secretive organization of benevolent technologists who seek to prevent the dark monsters of humanity’s past from overwhelming its bright and burgeoning future.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s A Gaze Blank and Pitiless as the Sun<\/em>, a 2013 album by the metal band Whelm, and a box set of experimental Norwegian music, Twenty Centuries of Stony Sleep<\/em>\u2014not to be confused with the work of the nineties grunge band Stony Sleep, who never released a self-titled album. Not to be outdone, the South African band Urban Creep recorded a song called \u201cSlow Thighs,\u201d a far cry from Yeats lyrically: \u201cSlow thighs walking on water\u2009\/\u2009See with brown eyes the fisherman\u2019s daughter\u2009\/\u2009She\u2019s crying with dry eyes\u2009\/\u2009The lamb for the slaughter.\u201d And in the age of self-publishing, the term \u201crough beast\u201d has itself been born anew: from Seth Chambers\u2019s short-story collection What Rough Beasts<\/em> (\u201cIt was late night when I came home to find a troglodyte in my shower,\u201d one story begins), to H.\u2009R. Knight\u2019s What Rough Beast<\/em> (wherein Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini join forces to expose a spiritualist medium, \u201cthe most debauched man in London\u201d), to Hunter Fox\u2019s \u201cRough Beast Homo Erotica\u201d trilogy \u201cGay Monster\u201d (worth the purchase price for Evil Pegasus Wants My Gay Ass<\/em> alone).<\/p>\n

It\u2019s tempting to say the feedback loop has gotten out of control\u2014to sneer at minor rock stars and hack writers who\u2019ve salvaged the poem for parts, yanking their titles from it without bothering to understand it. Achebe and Didion had paid it a kind of reverence, after all, and it\u2019s safe to say Kevin Smith has not.<\/p>\n

But why not celebrate the trend instead? Yeats\u2019s lines work outside their context because the word pairings are brilliant in and of themselves. \u201cBlank and pitiless as the sun,\u201d \u201cstony sleep,\u201d \u201cvexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle\u201d\u2014they\u2019re both jarring and sonorous. Even \u201cslouching towards,\u201d probably the most overused phrase of them all, retains its ominousness after all this repetition. We\u2019d expect the rough beast to \u201cplod,\u201d like a limping monster in a horror movie or the killer in No Country for Old Men <\/em>(which itself, of course, takes its title from another of Yeats\u2019s lines, in \u201cSailing to Byzantium\u201d). But plodding is a conscious action; slouching is not. We can\u2019t even tell whether the beast has a will of its own. The verb heightens the mystery and dread.<\/p>\n

Even if no one reads poetry anymore, \u201cThe Second Coming\u201d is proof that a perfect poem can still go viral in a distinctly predigital way: that it\u2019s become a part of the culture\u2019s water supply. Slouchy though they may be, the misapplications amount to a tribute.<\/p>\n

Nick Tabor is a reporter living in New York.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The widening gyre of heavy-handed allusions to Yeats\u2019s \u201cThe Second Coming.\u201d A recent Russia Today headline suggests that Europe is \u201cslouching towards anxiety and war.\u201d According to the title of Robert Bork\u2019s latest best seller, the United States is Slouching Towards Gomorrah. A new book by W.\u2009C. Harris, an English professor, claims we\u2019re Slouching Towards […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":815,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2157],"tags":[3870,1362,17702,17699,17703,17700,17701,8928,2462],"class_list":["post-84439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-poetry","tag-chinua-achebe","tag-joan-didion","tag-northrop-frye","tag-poems-poetry","tag-slouching-towards-bethlehem","tag-the-second-coming","tag-titles-allusions","tag-w-b-yeats","tag-woody-allen"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nYeats\u2019s \u201cSecond Coming\u201d\u2014Our Most Thoroughly Pillaged Poem<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Hundreds of titles borrow from Yeats\u2019s masterpiece, and not always knowledgeably.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/04\/07\/no-slouch\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"No Slouch by Nick Tabor\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"April 7, 2015 \u2013 The widening gyre of heavy-handed allusions to Yeats\u2019s \u201cThe Second Coming.\u201d A recent Russia Today headline suggests that Europe is \u201cslouching towards\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/04\/07\/no-slouch\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2015-04-07T17:30:04+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/yeats.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"701\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"555\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Nick Tabor\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Nick Tabor\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"9 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/04\/07\/no-slouch\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/04\/07\/no-slouch\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Nick Tabor\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/7b9d72d3d0f82629cfb3bae729c3b351\"},\"headline\":\"No Slouch\",\"datePublished\":\"2015-04-07T17:30:04+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/04\/07\/no-slouch\/\"},\"wordCount\":1827,\"commentCount\":35,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/04\/07\/no-slouch\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/yeats.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"Chinua Achebe\",\"Joan Didion\",\"Northrop Frye\",\"poems. poetry\",\"Slouching Towards Bethlehem\",\"the Second Coming\",\"titles allusions\",\"W.B. 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