Yeat's Second Coming

I am posting the text of this poem because it seems to be following me this semester. I find it interesting that the spiral and the labyrinth both revolve or turn around a center that is often thought of as the eye of the storm, the calm, still, unchanging, stable center surrounded by the chaotic and destructive motion all around it. Yet Yeats suggests that this is not strong enough to hold things together, and that "mere anarchy" will eventually reign. And I am not inclined to disagree with him. Achebe and Derrida both reference this in a spiral of connections. The second stanza holds a sphinx creature and an unborn beast, a la mythological labyrinths. Perhaps time itself is the labyrinth or spiral in which we are caught and which will eventually destroy us, to start its revolutions again. I'm probably simplifying this too much, but that is where my thoughts are at the moment. Connections between revolutions (turnings not necessarily wars, though I suppose that too) and revelations.

The Second Coming by W. B. Yeats

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?