Easter Rising
The Second Coming
June 6, 2020Turning 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 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?
-W.B. Yeats, 1919.
The poem, The Second Coming, was written in 1919 post WWI and the beginning of the Irish War of Independence following the Easter Rising.
[Image: https://www.radicalteatowel.com]
Eugene Debs started as a railroad worker and quickly became President of the American Railway Union, the first industrial union in the US, which he helped found. He led a boycott against handling trains with Pullman cars in what became the nationwide Pullman Strike; this granted him a six month sentence in prison for defying a court injunction against the strike.
Debs ran as a Socialist candidate for President of the United States five times, between 1900 and 1920, the last time from a prison cell.
[Image: https://www.radicalteatowel.com/tea-towels/eugene-debs-tea-towel]